Paint is the latest app to further ruin Windows 11's controversial context menus

Three years ago, when Microsoft announced Windows 11 with its redesigned context menu, the company said that the new menus aimed to streamline and simplify the user experience. To some extent, it does what it should—common file actions are closer to the cursor when you right-click, allowing you to do things faster. However, the promise to "simplify" stuff is falling apart big time.

Windows 11's context menu is already riddled with redundant stuff. Instead of adding new options to the "Open with" submenu, as it should be, Microsoft is cramming more and more "Edit with" options directly in the main menu. As a result, in addition to the standard "Open with" submenu, we now have four extra options for Notepad, Photos, Clipchamp, Photos (recent addition), and now Paint.

With the latest Paint update for Windows Insiders, which was announced on November 7, Microsoft added a new "Edit with Paint" option. It is not mentioned in the announcement blog post, but users quickly discovered that right-clicking a file after installing Paint version 11.2410.28.0 presents them with a new "Edit with Paint" option.

Fortunately, it only appears when you open context menus for image files, unlike Notepad, which Windows 11 suggests using for editing exe, PDF, video, and other completely unrelated files.

For now, the new Paint version with its redundant context menu entry is only available for Windows Insiders. Also, like it was with Notepad, Clipchamp, Photos, and other context menu-intruding apps, adding Paint's CLSID to a certain part of Windows Registry will remove the "Edit with Paint" entry from Windows 11's menus.

Other changes in the latest Paint update include generative fill, which lets you add AI-generated parts to your images, generative erase, some changes to Cocreator, and other improvements. You can learn more about them here.