One of the ways in which Windows 10 has been particularly unfriendly to portable software is via associations. The default applications menu under settings is bound and determined to get you to go through the Windows store or standard, installed software.
Solutions
1. Open With
Steps:
- Right-click on the file in question and choose Open With ..
- Click More apps and scroll down to the bottom
- Click Look for another app on this pc and navigate to the program you want to use (or paste in the full path name)
2. Drag-and-drop onto the program icon/shortcut
Drag a given file onto the shortcut (drag the your program of choice to the desktop and hold Ctrl+Shift to easily create a program shortcut). I have this enabled with LibreOffice on my desktop.
Issues with this track: you have to minimize everything to clear your desktop to launch files.
3. Use the send-to menu
Create a simple batch file to open up the SendTo menu for your specific user by creating a text file with the following text:
Code: Select all
explorer %AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo
Issues with this track: every time you open a file you have to right-click on it and goto a sub-menu. A few times a week (as I have for FileOptimizer) is fine, but it just gets tedious after the 5th or 6th time in a session.
4. Run an auto-association program like Coffee
Use a program that supersedes Windows own launching by file type. Despite it's age, my old program of choice Coffee still seems to run fine in Win10x64. Configuration of this program was addressed years ago in this thread.
Issues with this track: You have to build and maintain a program listing, and you can't change the file or folder locations. The program is ancient, no longer in development, and takes up 3 megs of RAM for something that I'm really frustrated isn't managed at an OS level.
5. CLI windows program / script (NOTE: I was never able to get this track to work.)
The best function I seemed to find here was something called SetUserFTA
Issues with this track: I could not for the life of me easily determine the ProgID, whatever the heck that is. The method for determining it via the assoc.exe didn't work for me, and I'm not sure it works for anyone.
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Feedback welcome on this.