&: Old missing undocumented Customize Start Menu keyboard shortcut

[JackDSRS]

I was looking for this in the help file and other documentation. It worked in the old Classic Shell and still works in Open Shell, but I don't see it anywhere.

I hate using the mouse when I could just use a way to use shortcut keys. Drives me crazy watching other people drag their cursor around on their screen taking forever.

Say I have a loooooong customized menu, I might have items that start with the following specific letters, but I have them in a non-sorted reason.

...a bunch of stuff at the top
Notepad++
Thorium
Paint Shop
Snipping Tool
Quicken
AutoHotkey Folder
Printkey

You can see they're out of alphabetical order. To get to Printkey, I could just keep pressing P over and over until I get to it, then hit Enter. But I can jump to it by just pressing P once with a little mod.

If I Edit Item, Label or Rename, I put a & in front of Printkey, so it appears as &Printkey. I save it, and it still looks like &Printkey in the Customize Start Menu. I click OK, and that closes the Open Shell settings.

When I open those choices now, you won't see the & symbol. What happens next is driven by how you open the menu. If you use the Win key to open and navigate the menus, at this submenu the P key will be underlined, and pressing P will jump over everything else and open up Printkey. If you mouse click to GET to that submenu, the P key will not be underlined, but pressing the P will still jump over everything else to open Printkey.

Now, that's a lot to open just a single item, but I use it to open a menu of Frequently Used items. Unlike the Recent items list, these are things that I use really often, and I don't want disappearing off of the Recent items list.

On my furthest left side of that custom start menu, I have &Frequent, with my custom sub commands under it. Pressing Win+F, bypasses anything in the Recent list, Programs, Computer, Settings, Run, or anything else in that menu (I've removed a lot I don't use). If I've opened FotoSketcher recently, it appears higher up in the menu than Frequent, but using the F key this way jumps past FotoSketcher down to the Frequent.

Pretty much, you can actually add the & symbol in front of any letter to use it as a Alt+ combination. It doesn't have to be the first letter. You could have Quic&ken, it would look like Quicken with the "k" underlined, and the in that particular menu "k" would open it.

I don't explain things well here, maybe, but you can play around with it. It just requires the "&" symbol, so adding and deleting it is simple and it doesn't break anything since it just goes into the Label portion of the menu entry.

[JackDSRS]

Oh, those extra separators just make it easier for this old man to see better.