When Microsoft announced Windows 10 back in 2014, it came with a fantastic, powerful Start Menu which everybody enjoyed. That Start Menu was built using DirectUI, but that changed with the launch of the Windows 10 Technical Preview 2. In January, Microsoft unveiled a new Start Menu, rebuilt from the ground up using XAML, and since it was announced so early in development Insiders got their hands on it and immediately began complaining at the fact it was missing pretty much everything that made the older Start Menu great.
Microsoft has said countless times that features such as being able to resize the Start Menu, drag and drop programs, and use Jump Lists would make a return eventually. The ability to drag and drop programs is now back in build 10041, however there’s still no sign of Jump Lists or resizing. Well, sort of. You can enable early code for the new Jump Lists feature in build 10041, and it works much like you’d expect.
It works for all programs which support Jump Lists in Windows 8.x and Windows 7, so developers don’t need to rewrite their software to implement Jump List functionality. Furthermore, the Jump Lists work with Modern UI apps too such as the Xbox Music and Video apps which is pretty nice. Considering this is early code, the UI is far from finished. Also, since this feature isn’t enabled by default it’s fair to say that there’s reason for that, the feature does appear to be quite unstable right now.
For those who want to try out Jump Lists with the new Start Menu, just follow the steps below.
- Open regedit.exe (Win+R)
- Navigate to: “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced”
- Create a new “Dword (32-bit) value”
- Name it “EnableXamlJumpView”
- Set its value to 1
- Restart PC
And there you have it. Now the next time you wish to use Jump Lists on a program which supports it, you should have the option to do so.
Thanks for the tip, anonymous!
