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Interactive Fiction Archive VS ShellNewHandler

Compare Interactive Fiction Archive VS ShellNewHandler and see what are their differences

Interactive Fiction Archive

Online interactive fiction archive

Rating
0 reviews
Promote on VibeVoted
Alternatives Is it good?
ShellNewHandler

SourceForge.net: ShellNewHandler details page

Rating
0 reviews
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Alternatives Is it good?
PingWise
Down only when probes on three continents agree. Prepaid credits, no seats, no tiers. sponsored
Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

Which is more popular?

Based on our record, Interactive Fiction Archive should be more popular than ShellNewHandler. It has been mentioned 3 times since March 2021.

social mentions
3 vs 2
Visual Novel Engine popularity
100% vs 0%

Base details

Website, pricing, platforms and company facts side by side.

Interactive Fiction Archive
ShellNewHandler
Website ifarchive.org sourceforge.net
Listed in
Visual Novel Engine Project Management Text Editors Markdown Editor +1
Cloud Storage Monitoring Tools File Sharing Website Monitoring +1

Analysis

An editorial look at what each product does well and who it suits.

Interactive Fiction Archive
ShellNewHandler

Overall verdict

  • The Interactive Fiction Archive (ifarchive.org) is an excellent, long-standing, and authoritative repository for interactive fiction. It has served the IF community since 1992 as a free, community-maintained resource, preserving thousands of text adventures, tools, and development resources with remarkable reliability and openness.

Why this product is good

  • It is the definitive and most comprehensive archive of interactive fiction, hosting thousands of games, competitions entries, and historical works spanning decades
  • It is completely free to access and download, with no paywalls or accounts required
  • It preserves the history of the medium, including classic text adventures and rare works that might otherwise be lost
  • It hosts development tools, interpreters, and programming systems (like Inform, TADS, and Glulx) alongside the games themselves
  • It is community-maintained and mirrored across multiple servers for reliability and longevity
  • It supports open standards and file formats, ensuring games remain playable across platforms

Recommended for

  • Fans and players of interactive fiction and text adventure games
  • Authors and developers looking for IF authoring tools, interpreters, and documentation
  • Researchers and historians studying the history of interactive fiction and early gaming
  • Participants in IF competitions such as IFComp who want to find or submit works
  • Retro gaming enthusiasts seeking classic text-based games

Overall verdict

  • ShellNewHandler is a niche, lightweight utility hosted on SourceForge designed to give users more control over the Windows 'New' context menu (the ShellNew menu). It can be considered good for its specific narrow use case, but it is an older, minimally maintained tool that may not suit all users, especially those on modern Windows versions.

Why this product is good

  • Provides direct control over customizing the Windows right-click 'New' menu, allowing users to add or remove file type entries
  • Lightweight and free, without bundled bloatware typical of some other free utilities
  • Simple and focused in scope, making it easy to understand for its specific purpose
  • Open distribution via SourceForge allows transparency and no-cost access

Recommended for

  • Power users who want to declutter or customize the Windows New context menu
  • IT administrators managing standardized desktop environments across multiple machines
  • Users comfortable with older utility-style tools and Windows registry-related tweaks
  • Not recommended for casual users seeking modern, actively supported software with regular updates

Category popularity

How often each product is chosen within a category, 0–100% relative to the other.

Score bands 0–20 21–40 41–50 51–60 61–100
Interactive Fiction Archive
ShellNewHandler
100% 100%
Visual Novel Engine
0% 0%
0% 0%
Website Monitoring
100% 100%
100% 100%
Text Editors
0% 0%
0% 0%
File Sharing
100% 100%

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Recommendations tracked on public social media and blogs since March 2021.

Interactive Fiction Archive 3 mentions
ShellNewHandler 2 mentions
  • How to program a text adventure in C
    Some good places to start: - https://planet-if.com/ - https://intfiction.org/ - https://grumpygamer.com/why_adventure_games_suck/ - https://ifarchive.org/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Are people still interested in text based games with some pixel art images?
    Interactive Fiction is a thing, chose your adventure games like The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante have an audience, as do visual novels. Source: over 3 years ago
  • What are the best c64 games in your opinion? And why (optionally)?
    If you like Interactive Fiction as it's called, there's lots of IF games available online which you can run on both old and modern devices. See the IFWiki, IF Archive and IFDB. Source: over 4 years ago
  • I recently got libreoffice, but now the new option in right click looks like a mess. Can someone help me get rid of them please?
    Use Shell New Handler. Run the portable app and simply untick the items you don't want to appear in your new context menu. Source: about 4 years ago
  • This menu should be easy to add/remove programs to... Who is really creating Access Databases from this menu often enough to keep it here? (Not me!) Is there an easy way to edit this?
    I've always used ShellNewHandler for this. It's a really simple portable utility that allows you to remove most of the items from that menu. Tested it out on Windows 11 and it's still compatible. Source: over 5 years ago

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