6 Ways to Disable Right Click on Mouse in Windows
We all know what the right click context menu is in Windows and how it works. At its best, the menu can be a hugely valuable resource to get certain tasks accomplished more quickly than digging through programs and their settings to do the same thing. But what if this menu is getting in your way for some reason and you want to disable it?
Perhaps you or your children are playing games in a browser and keep accidentally right clicking when you don’t want to, or you just don’t want somebody inexperienced to have access to the quick options of renaming or deleting something on the desktop in case they delete something they shouldn’t. Disabling the right click of the mouse might sound like a simple thing, but you can’t just press a button in Windows to turn it off without a piece of 3rd party software or going deeper into the system settings.
Here’s a selection of 6 solutions to enable you to turn off the right click of the mouse so the context menu isn’t called and can’t be triggered by accident.
1. Kid Key LockWe’ve mentioned Kid Key Lock before about restricting or disabling keyboard and mouse buttons. It can be set up to disable right click, left click, middle click, double click, and the scroll wheel. Open the program, check the required mouse locks boxes, and press OK. The program’s tray icon will flash when a locked button is pressed, you can also change the locks from the tray icon Locks sub menu.
It would have been more useful if the password option could be used to lock the setup options screen in case you want to stop the user from enabling the mouse buttons again. However, that option is only useful when completely locking the keyboard. If you don’t want any keyboard restrictions, make sure to move the keyboard locks slider all the way to the left. There is a portable version and also an installer version available.
Download Kid Key Lock | Kid Key Lock Portable
2. MurGee Mouse Disabler 1.0
Mouse Disabler is like a simpler version of Kid Key Lock. It shows the tick box options to disable the left, right, and double clicks with a few others you might find useful such as mouse movements and the scroll wheel. The Disable Keyboard Keys option will turn off the most basic keyboard input.
Actions are applied as soon as you tick the box and the program doesn’t close to the tray or disappear into the background, but instead simply minimizes to a taskbar icon. Even though Mouse Disabler needs installing you can copy its executable and Helper.dll from Program Files to make it portable or extract with a utility like Universal Extractor. Both files total 86KB in size.
Note that Mouse Disabler versions newer than 1.0 downloaded from the developer website or elsewhere are shareware and require payment. Make sure to download the right version from our link below.
3. X-Mouse Button Control
X-Mouse Button Control has been around since about 2005 and it’s still actively developed. This tool is quite a powerful option for those looking to change or edit the actions of the mouse buttons and the scroll wheel. Although X-Mouse Button Control can be very advanced with the actions you can perform within the program, just disabling the right mouse click is very easy.
All you have to do is open the main window (use the tray icon), click the drop down box next to “Right Button” and select Disable, then click Apply. Pressing Scroll Lock on your keyboard will disable the actions of X-Mouse Button Control and you’ll be able to use right click again. If you want right click to do something else, such as emulate left click, select it from the dozens of options in the same drop down menu.
Not only can X-Mouse Button Control do the same for other mouse buttons or the scroll wheel, but you can also create profiles that will only work on certain processes or open windows. So, if you only want to disable the right mouse click on a specific program, it’s easily possible. X-Mouse Button Control is available as a setup installer or portable version.
Download X-Mouse Button Control
4. BasicMouse
This is a shareware utility called BasicMouse and BasicBoard, which used to be called BabyMouse. It allows you to easily restrict several functions of the computer mouse and keyboard. The right mouse button can be disabled, all buttons can be set to send left-clicks, mouse clicks can be restricted to a particular area of the screen, and etc.
Recent versions restrict the program to a 30 day trial which costs $9.95 to activate. Older versions limit some of the features to 5 minutes of usage but disabling the right click is free to use. Simply run this older version of the program and press Start. It will sit in the system tray for as long as you like disabling the mouse right click without needing to touch any of the time limited functions.
The downside is it also disables the scroll wheel as well which you might not want. The merge mouse buttons option is limited to 5 minutes, so leave it alone. The .NET Framework 2.0/3.5 is required to be installed for Windows 10 users.
Download BasicMouse Free (Disable Right Click version)
5. Using an AutoHotKey script
AutoHotKey is used for creating scripts and macros and can automate a large number of tasks in Windows if you take a bit of time and patience to learn how it works. In its most basic form, AutoHotKey can disable the mouse right click functionality with just 1 line of code, which is:
RButton:: return
That just tells the script to intercept the right mouse button and then do nothing with it. Although the right click is disabled, you can still Shift right click in Windows or to exit the script. With a bit more creativity you can add other things to the script such as disabling the tray icon, adding a password to turn it on and off, etc.
If you want to try it out, here’s a compiled script with just that 1 line.
Download DisableRightMouseClick
6. Disable Right Click Via the Registry
There’s a registry entry you can add to disable the mouse right click. This only works on the desktop and Explorer though and doesn’t affect any programs. You can also still right click on the task bar and control the tray programs via right click. This obviously isn’t the best solution around but it does provide a small level of desktop protection over accidentally doing something via the Explorer context menu.
1. Press Start (or press Win key+R) and type Regedit, then hit Enter. Navigate to the following key in the registry:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
2. Right click on the Explorer key and select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value.
3. Give it the name NoViewContextMenu and click OK. Double click the name and set the value data as 1. Press OK. To set it back again simply set this value back to 0 or right click on the NoViewContextMenu entry and delete it. You will need to log off or reboot for any of these changes to take effect.
Adding the registry tweak above will disable the mouse right click for all users on the computer. If you only want to disable for the currently logged in user, you need to navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER instead of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE:
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
For ease of use and to save you going into the registry we have created these keys in easy to run .reg files which simply need to be double clicked on.
Disable Right Click for All Users
Re-enable Right Click for All Users
I have recently developed paraesthesia (partial numbness and loss of dexterity) in the third to fifth digits of my right hand. This means that I cannot easily hold the third digit off the right mouse button and as a result frequently right click while I am left clicking. This has the effect of cancelling the left click and substituting the effects of a right click. I do not want to disable right clicking as such, but I do want right click not to have any effect while the left mouse button is pressed. Any thoughts?
The AutoHotKey Script is quite clever as it blocks right click but doesn’t block Ctrl-right-click which is almost always the same. So you can have menus, just if you press ctrl (or shift) when needed.
You can also always ctrl-right click the icon in the tray and suspend the script or exit it, so that it won’t interfere.
Nº 3. Using an AutoHotKey script. He gives a link to download the script and try it but then he puts a password in it and don’t show it. Is this stupid???
P.S. I disabled the right-click button by jamming a paper clip into the small space between the button’s up and down positions. That low-tech solution seems to be working well so far. It may work loose eventually, but it’s pretty firmly in there at the moment, and it’s jammed into the front of the mouse where my hand never is. Even if the paper clip does pop out occasionally, it will be easy to jam it back in, and that sure beats having to click on the screen to get rid of unwanted menus that keep popping up all the time, because I have to have my hand on the mouse and if I do that, it’s very hard to completely avoid the right button continually. I’ve put up with the right click button for a very long time, and it was always a real pain. I wish I’d thought of this solution right away. Benjamin Franklin would probably have realized almost immediately what he should do to get rid of the annoyance, but he was always thinking and I’m not.
Somebody less lazy and more entrepreneurial than myself should produce and sell a mouse with a little switch that can quickly be moved left or right, to enable or disable the right-click button. The switch should be in front of the mouse, out of the plane of where person puts his fingers naturally when using a mouse, or one would be flipping the switch back and forth accidentally which would be no help at all. Such a mouse might sell like hot cakes. I’d buy one if it wasn’t exorbitantly priced. It would be easier than sticking a paper clip into the right=clip gap when I want to play “24.7 spades”, or look through lists without unexpectedly highlighting everything and its brother, or try work with anything where the right click button triggers “helpful” popup menus all the time as I move my mouse around.
Pure genius. Thank you, Geoff!
You got me thinking…I stuck the corner of a 3M poster mounting sticky square into the slot and since it’s sticky, it won’t slip out! :-)
Beautiful and elegant! Change your name to Benjamin.
Genius. Thanks Geoff.
Mouse Disabler is a very dangerous program for amateurs. I installed it then, due to inattention, I checked “disable left mouse” instead of “disable right mouse”. After that, I couldn’t do anything because the left mouse button is needed for almost everything. After playing around for half an hour, including rebooting in SAFE mode (which didn’t help), I finally got to the program location and deleted the program. Now my computer works again.. I’d like to tell you how I finally managed to delete the program from my computer, but I don’t remember how I did it. There’s no way I’m going near this program again with a ten-foot pole though. That mistake is too easy to make and too hard to rectify. I still want to disable my right mouse button, because it keeps popping up menus and highlighting stuff, which is a royal pain in the you-know what. It’s very hard – impossible really – to avoid touching it all the time. I don’t use the right mouse button for anything at all, so if I could just glue it in place that would almost be an acceptable solution for me. I’ll look around some more for something not as dangerous, though.
Are you people being serious? You’re so inept that you can’t just not click the button? This is one of the most moronic threads I have ever seen in my life. You people need a lot more help than a button to disable a button. I’m sorry, but if this is a real issue for you, then I’m truly not sure how you have survived so long. You are one of the people who are lucky that warning labels exist. Else you would just be drinking bleach stating “It was in my hand and very hard – impossible really – not to drink.”
Thanks for this guide.
I disabled the right click with your script, now how do I enable it again?
There are separate downloads to disable and re-enable in the article.
Mouse Disabler worked for free at first, now it won’t load without paying $5 for registration
thanks for that entry. always nice to be warned
thanks man
Very very nice website with important working tips. Ilike it, I Love it……..
Thank you for your lesson.
just make it, works for me.
Nice Tutorial……^_^
This is useful.
Thanks! This was the only solution I found online that worked!
Andrea
*smiles
Keep the good tips coming…
thanks
Thanks a lot for this great post. I work at a computer/tech store and we have a number of computers availble for customers to access our website to check for products. However, due to recent events I ended up having to set up the computers so that they were a bit more secure.
I managed to set it up rather well, but this rightclick context menu editor just might be helpful if they do get out of the kiosk setup.
this is really a valuable information for me. thanks for proving this valuable information. i was facing the problems caused by using the right click by any amateur user of computer.
thanks Raymond