A start menu is the most-used surface on a computer and the one users are consulted about least.

Every major release rearranges the same furniture

One version removed the menu outright. The next replaced it with a grid of tiles. The current one centres it, simplifies it, and puts recommendations in it. Each time, a considerable number of people finish setting up a new machine by looking for a way to make the menu behave the way it did in the version they had learned by heart.

For years the best answer to that was a single long-running project. Its author stopped developing it and released the source under a permissive licence, and volunteers took over under the name this article is about, which has kept going ever since — the repository has collected more than nine thousand stars, which is a reasonable measure of how many people still care about one menu.

Three components, one of which matters to everyone

The start menu is the visible part. Three arrangements are offered: a single column in the style of much older systems, a two-column layout in the style of the version most people mean when they say classic, and a third variant close to that. Each can be adjusted in detail — height and width, appearance through built-in or third-party skins, the buttons beside the power control, search behaviour, how many recent programs are listed.

The second component adds a toolbar to the file explorer, restoring the button that goes up one level, the cut, copy, paste and delete buttons, and a properties button. People who work from the keyboard will not need them; people who work from the mouse will notice the difference within an afternoon, because those actions stop requiring a right click and a submenu.

The third adds a title bar and status text to the browser the system used to ship. It is honest to say this part has little value now — the vendor itself abandoned that browser years ago — and its presence is a reminder of how long this project has been running.

Against the paid alternatives

Several commercial products do the same job with more polish, and charge a small one-time price for it. The prices are not outrageous, and yet paying for a start menu leaves a strange taste: it is a shell surface, not a creative tool. This one is free and open, and does not offer fewer layouts or fewer skins than the paid options.

The cost is configuration. After installing you spend a few minutes choosing a layout and adjusting what appears where. That is presented as a drawback and is really the opposite: the paid tools give you a fixed set of presets, this one gives you the settings those presets are made of.

Compatibility and restraint

It covers the Windows versions from the one that introduced the ribbon era through the current release, including recent feature updates, and it is a single-platform tool by design rather than a limitation that was overlooked. Removing it is uneventful: uninstall normally and the system's own menu returns, with no residue to clean up afterwards.

For managed environments there are policy-based configuration and unattended installation parameters, so an administrator can push one menu layout to a fleet rather than explaining the settings to each user. That detail is the difference between a personal tweak and something an organisation can adopt.

Why it is worth five minutes

Nothing here is dramatic. No new capability appears, no workflow is reinvented. What happens is that a surface you touch fifty times a day stops being an argument — no recommendations, no advertising, no rearranged icons after an update, just a list of what is installed, in the order you put it in.

The project has been maintained quietly for close to a decade without a price, without bundled extras and without pop-ups. In the current software climate, that restraint is rarer than the feature it delivers.