Software Alternatives & Startups

ShellNewHandler VS Tavern.app

Compare ShellNewHandler VS Tavern.app and see what are their differences

ShellNewHandler

SourceForge.net: ShellNewHandler details page

Rating
0 reviews
Tavern.app

A session journal, a campaign wiki and a map that fill themselves in from the notes your table already takes. Free for your whole table, any game, any system.

Rating
0 reviews
Pricing
Freemium Free trial
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, ShellNewHandler seems to be more popular. It has been mentioned 2 times since March 2021.

social mentions
2 vs 0
File Sharing popularity
100% vs 0%

Base details

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

ShellNewHandler
Tavern.app
Website sourceforge.net gettavern.app
Pricing —
Freemium Free trial
Company — Startup from the United States · 1 - 9 employees · 2026
Listed in

About ShellNewHandler and Tavern.app

In their own words, as submitted to SaaSHub.

ShellNewHandler
Tavern.app

No description of ShellNewHandler yet.

Tavern (gettavern.app) is a free web app for tabletop groups, any game, any system: a session journal, a campaign wiki, a shared map and character sheets in one place. The Game Master hands the table one link and each player picks a seat. Anyone at the table can add notes to a session, during or...

Read more about Tavern.app

Features and specs

What each product offers, as listed by its team.

ShellNewHandler 0 features
Tavern.app 5 features

No features have been listed yet.

  • Session Journal
    A page per play date that the Game Master manages and the whole table can contribute to. Who was there, what they did, what it cost.
  • Campaign Wiki
    People, places, things and unfinished business, each on its own page, each linked from every note that mentions it. Click a name in a session and you land on what you already know about it.
  • GM Tools
    The Game Master gets their own drawer: a Combat Tracker that holds the whole encounter in one order, a Master HUD that puts the party's numbers in front of them at a glance, and a Bestiary to look something up before deciding it turns up.
  • Character Sheets
    Build a character by hand or bring one in from the service you already use, and customize it fully to your liking: hit points, spell slots, actions, inventory and companions, all in one place.
  • Lorekeeper
    GMs paste in their session notes and Lorekeeper reads them, intelligently adding or updating wiki entries, map pins, and more.

Analysis

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

ShellNewHandler
Tavern.app

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

No analysis of Tavern.app yet.

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
ShellNewHandler
Tavern.app
100% 100%
0% 0%
0% 0%
100% 100%
100% 100%
0% 0%
0% 0%
100% 100%

Questions & Answers

As answered by people managing ShellNewHandler and Tavern.app.

What makes your product unique?

Tavern.app's answer:

The wiki fills itself in from the notes your table already takes. Anyone at the table writes a session note; a name or a place in it links to that thing's own wiki page, with backlinks to every session it appeared in. Nobody builds a structure first. Everything else hangs off that loop: a map with pins, character sheets built by hand or synced from the sheet service you already use, private and shared player notebooks, and a Combat Tracker where the GM changes a hit point once and it changes on the sheet the player is already watching. It runs in the browser on a phone with nothing to install, every seat is free with no cap on campaigns or players, and the one optional paid part, Lorekeeper, writes the wiki entries and map pins from the GM's own notes and is off unless the GM sends it a session.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

Tavern.app's answer:

Because the whole table can be on it without anyone paying and without anyone doing homework. Most campaign wikis cap a free campaign at eight to twelve members or sell player slots by the owner's tier; a Tavern campaign has no seat cap and players never pay. Most of them also ask you to create entities and folders before they are useful; Tavern asks you to write a session note and makes the pages from it. It reads well on a phone under the table, which is where sessions happen. And it takes a clear stance on trust: it ships none of any publisher's content, never trains AI on what a table writes, and keeps the one AI feature opt-in and off by default. If you want your notes as files on your own disk, use Obsidian. If you want the table inside the notes, this is the one.

How would you describe the primary audience of your product?

Tavern.app's answer:

Game Masters running an ongoing tabletop roleplaying campaign, any system, and the four or five players at their table. The GM is the person who starts a campaign and hands out the link; the players are the people who open it on a phone on the way over. It suits long campaigns most: a table that meets every week or two, keeps forgetting who that merchant was, and has tried a shared doc or a wiki app and drifted off it. College clubs and other groups that start several campaigns at once are a natural fit too, since a new table gets one link and a shared place to write from session one.

What's the story behind your product?

Tavern.app's answer:

I run a table in Nashville and I was the one person at it who remembered anything. Every session opened with me retelling the last one to people who had been there. I tried a shared doc, a wiki app and a notes app with plugins; each one asked the table to build a structure before it paid off, and each one lived on a laptop while my players held phones. So I built the thing I wanted: a session journal the whole table writes in, where a name in a note becomes a page, on a phone, free for every seat. My own campaign ran on it first. Sign-ups opened in August 2026, and I want to build the rest of it alongside the people using it: tell me what's awesome, what sucks and what's missing.

Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

Tavern.app's answer:

TypeScript throughout. React 19 with Vite and Tailwind, framer-motion for motion and TanStack Query for data, served as a PWA that installs per campaign. A Hono API on Cloudflare Workers, with D1 (SQLite) for the journals and R2 for uploaded pictures, all on the Workers free plan. Share cards and the icon set's PNGs are rasterised in the Worker with satori and resvg. Mail goes through Resend. Lorekeeper, the optional AI feature, is a scheduled Claude agent that claims jobs from a queue in D1 and lands each session as a versioned database migration, so every wiki page it touches keeps a revision snapshot. Tests in vitest, including one that fails the build if any publisher's content or a game's name ever gets into the product.

Who are some of the biggest customers of your product?

Tavern.app's answer:

  • My own table in Nashville, the first campaign in the database
  • A handful of home tables and college groups who signed up in the first week; they are private groups and I don't name them

User comments

Share your experience with using ShellNewHandler and Tavern.app. For example, how are they different and which one is better?

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Social recommendations and mentions

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

ShellNewHandler 2 mentions
Tavern.app 0 mentions
  • 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

Tracking Tavern.app since Sep 2026.