The Leasey Start Menu serves two purposes. It allows you to access computing applications you may wish to frequently launch. But it also allows you to open common utilities in Windows it may be more difficult to get access to. One could assume that such a feature is designed for computer beginners. However, we already know that experienced users of JAWS are benefiting from it.
In order to bring into view the Leasey Start Menu, you press the Leasey Key then Windows+S. Leasey ships with a number of links to tools and utilities you may want on the special Leasey start menu, although as can be seen later, you can remove these if you wish.
Once launched, it is simply a case of using first letter navigation or the Up and Down Arrow keys to move to the item you want, then press Enter. The associated program or utility will be launched.
As previously explained, we have provided a number of suggested items you may wish to use. This include links to word processors, web browsers and so on. Below all of these, you will find a collection of links to tools, such as to move into your Windows System Volume settings, the area of Windows where you can uninstall programs, the Task Manager, Shut Down the Computer, and more.
The items are not arranged in alphabetical order. This is by design. It could be that you would like to rearrange the order of the items, or remove those you know you are never going to need. As will be seen in the next section, you can do these things yourself and they will be displayed in the order of your choosing.
At the bottom of the Leasey Start Menu, you will find two special items: Configure the Leasey Start Menu and Restore Leasey Start Menu to the defaults.
Choosing the "Restore" option will do just that. It will reinstate all the shortcuts we provided you with originally. You will be asked first if you are sure you would like to restore to the defaults? If this is what you want, press Enter as the "Yes" Button is focused.
We will now turn our attention to the "Configure" option.
Pressing Enter on this item takes you into a simple text file, known as an INI file. This contains, in order, all the items the Leasey Start Menu gives to you. Configuring this file is not for the novice computer user, although some guidance appears below. If you corrupt the file in some way, you can always restore it back to the way it was by activating the last item on the Leasey Start Menu.
The structure of the file looks like this:
First you have the name given to the program or utility, then an equals sign, followed by the executable which launches it. Here are some examples:
File Explorer=Explorer.exe
notepad=Notepad.exe
In the case of Notepad, the file which launches this is called Notepad.exe. If you are familiar with the Windows "Run" Dialog Box, you will know you can type "Notepad.exe" into it, press Enter, and Notepad will launch. The procedure to configure this is exactly the same.
You can do a number of things here if you wish to add further items:
You can add a new entry to the file anywhere you like. For example, if you would like the Wordpad word processor in the menu, which we have not included, you can type:
Wordpad=Wordpad.ex
Then save the file with Control+S.
To be a little more adventurous, if you really wanted to, there is nothing stopping you adding the path to a document or other kind of file. For example, if you regularly wish to access a document called My Template.docx, and it is located in D Colon Backslash Documents, you can add an entry as follows:
My Template=d:\documents\My Template.docx
A tool is built into Leasey which will attempt to add an entry to the Leasey Start Menu automatically. Each new entry is added to the very bottom of the file so it will be easy to find. You will want to check the newly added entry in a moment.
Now, go back to the Leasey Start Menu with the Leasey Key then Windows+S, and take a look at the last application entry, just above the Configure and Restore to Default options. You should find the name of your application there.
It could well be that Leasey has misinterpreted the name. This particularly occurs with some Twitter clients or similar, which are prepared using a commonly used programming platform. If this is so, you will want to go to the option to configure the Leasey Start Menu, and edit the text associated with the application name, so it conforms to something which is more suitable.
When configuring the Leasey Start Menu configuration file, you can: