MyStartMenu

English · Türkçe

A personal Start menu for Windows 11. Written in plain C++ with Direct2D and Windows.UI.Composition: no .NET, no XAML, no installer, about 15 MB of memory in Task Manager.

The interface is in Turkish.

Features

• Groups: drag apps to reorder and group them; groups can stand in up to four columns, their tiles scaled down.
• Folders column: any folder, or This PC, Network, Control Panel; can be turned off.
• Acrylic background: adjustable transparency and colour.
• Adjustable layout: menu size, tile size and spacing, icon sizes, app names.

All settings are in the settings panel (the brush button left of the account picture), and saved to %AppData%\MyStartMenu\config.json.

Install

1. Download MyStartMenu.exe from Releases.
2. Put it in a folder of its own where it will stay, for example C:\Programs\MyStartMenu\. (It writes its error log next to itself, so pick a folder you can write to.)
3. Run it. The menu opens, and from then on it starts with Windows.

Requires Windows 11, x64. Nothing else to install.

Good to know

• Moved the exe? The start-with-Windows task remembers where the exe was. Right-click the tray icon and turn "Başlangıçta çalıştır" off and on again.
• SmartScreen warning. The exe is not signed, so Windows may warn about an unrecognised app the first time. Choose "More info", then "Run anyway".
• Antivirus. To catch the Win key and the Start button the menu uses a system-wide keyboard and mouse hook, which some antivirus programs look at twice.
• First run. The menu copies your current Windows Start pins once; after that its pins are its own and are not synced with Windows'.
• Turn it off for a while from the tray icon's menu ("Win tuşu ve Başlat düğmesi bu menüyü açsın"); Windows' own Start menu then works as usual.

Known limitations

• While a menu of a program running as administrator is open (for example some tray icons' right-click menus), clicking the Start button opens Windows' own menu: Windows does not let a normal program see those clicks. The Win key still works.
• The shell's own panels (search, notification centre, quick settings, jump lists) are closed when the menu opens; in rare cases with several of them open at once, one may stay open.

Build

Needs the Visual Studio 2026 Build Tools (MSVC, C++ workload) and the Windows SDK 10.0.26100.

build.cmd

builds bin\MyStartMenu.exe. There is no project file; build.cmd calls cl directly, after vcvars64.bat from the Build Tools' default install folder (edit the path in build.cmd if yours is elsewhere). The C++ runtime is linked statically, so the exe runs on its own.

MyStartMenu.exe --render <folder> draws the menu's views to PNG files without showing anything, which is handy for checking layout changes.

License

MIT