Desktop context menu

The desktop context menu is a NeXT-style menu that opens at the pointer. Right-click an empty part of the desktop, or long-press it on a touch screen. A quick two-finger tap also opens the menu; on a phone this works inside an ordinary window too, away from controls, menus and dialogs.

The factory menu offers New VM, Terminal, Workspace, lists of VMs, apps and windows, Show All Windows, tools, Cloudflare and Help. You can rename or reorder items, add shortcuts and group them in submenus.

Edit and save

Choose Customize… to open the menu editor. Edit the text, then click Save, or press Command-S on a Mac or Ctrl-S elsewhere. Save checks the format first: an error identifies and selects the bad line, and your current menu stays in place until the file is valid. The scrollbars run along the document's right and bottom edges; drag the resize tile where they meet to make the editor wider or taller.

The menu is stored as System :menu.txt (normally ~/.exe/appdata/System/menu.txt). A saved change reaches other open desktops and syncs to joined nodes. Each desktop fills the automatic lists from its own VMs, installed apps and open windows. Existing custom menus keep their contents when the factory menu changes; add new shortcuts to your own file with Customize….

Menu format

Write one item per line. Separate the label from its action with a tab or at least two spaces. Single spaces are fine inside a label; two spaces end it. Action names, list names and VM tab names are lowercase and case-sensitive.

In the format examples below, <TAB> means a tab character, not the literal text <TAB>. The complete example menu further down uses spaces and can be copied directly.

Indent submenu children consistently, for example with two spaces per level. The top level has no indentation. When returning to a parent level, use exactly its earlier indentation. Only a plain submenu heading can have indented children; an action or automatic list cannot.

Except for terminal, arguments are separated by whitespace: quotation marks do not combine words into one argument. A Workspace path or app name containing spaces therefore cannot be used directly in an edit, workspace or app item. Use workspace to browse to that file or folder, or @apps to list apps by their display names. Put comments on their own lines, rather than after an action.

All supported actions

The following table lists every supported action. In the syntax column, angle brackets mark a required value and square brackets an optional one; replace these placeholders rather than typing the brackets. Each action needs a label before it, as in My terminal<TAB>terminal.

For workspace and edit, use relative paths such as Projects/demo or Projects/demo/README.md. Absolute paths and paths that escape the Workspace are rejected. For built-in apps, use their lowercase IDs: app macos9, app hub or app bluepencil. Other apps use their installed folder name. There is no separate macos9 action in the customization format; use app macos9.

The command after terminal is kept as one command line, including spaces, quotes and shell operators. For example, Monitor<TAB>terminal btop opens btop on the host if it is installed. On Linux and macOS it runs in the host user's login shell; on Windows it runs in PowerShell. The terminal session ends when the command exits. To reach a VM's shell instead, use vm <name> term.

VM tabs

Use these values as the optional second argument to vm. For example, Demo terminal<TAB>vm demo term opens the Terminal tab of the VM named demo.

Automatic lists

These lists fill themselves when you open the menu. Use a list name alone to insert its entries in place, or give it a label to make a submenu. They take no arguments. An empty list shows a disabled No VMs, No Apps or No Windows entry.

Each @vms submenu offers Open, Open Terminal, btop, Chat with this VM, Start or Stop, Restart, Copy IP, Expose Port… and Publish to GitHub…. Availability follows the VM's state, its IP and Chat availability. Delete is not included. These operations are supplied by @vms; names such as start, stop and restart are not standalone customization actions.

Example menu

This example uses two spaces between a label and its action, and two spaces of indentation for each submenu level. Replace demo and the Workspace paths with your own VM and files; install btop on the host to use the monitor shortcut.

# My desktop menu
New VM…  newvm
Terminal  terminal
Workspace  workspace
-
Projects
  Demo folder  workspace Projects/demo
  Demo README  edit Projects/demo/README.md
  Demo terminal  vm demo term
  Demo notes  vm demo notes
Tools
  Monitor  terminal btop
  Claude Code  claude
  Codex  codex
  Mac OS 9  app macos9
  Hub  app hub
Virtual Machines  @vms
Applications  @apps
Windows  @windows
Show All Windows  showall
-
Help
  Using exe  docs
  Online documentation  url https://exe.v2core.com/docs/
Customize…  customize

Limits and recovery

The menu may contain up to 300 entries, counting headings, actions, automatic-list entries in the file and separators across all levels. Expanded list contents do not count toward that limit. Labels may be up to 60 characters; the file must be UTF-8 and at most 64 KiB. You can nest three submenu levels below the root (four levels in total).

If you remove customize, the desktop appends Customize… so you can always get back to the editor. If a stored or synced file cannot be parsed, the desktop uses the factory menu and adds The menu file has an error… to open the editor on the problem.

To reset, choose Restore Defaults and confirm, or clear the editor completely and Save. This removes the custom menu from every desktop sharing the desk. Only an empty or whitespace-only file restores defaults; a file containing just comments is still a custom menu.