Get the night light into the Windows 11 start menu.

In Windows 10 there is a notification side panel. Inside it you could easily toggle the night mode, which they call night light. 

What's good about this feature? It's a lot more pleasant to look at screens when color accuracy isn't needed. Windows itself shifts to a golden color cast. It doesn't need to only be for use in the evening. 

I looked around in Windows 11, but there appears to be no way to toggle the feature without digging into system settings or enabling a fixed daily timer. 

My overall experience with Windows 11 tends to be one of frustration with the limited nature of its interface and intentional inconvenient multi-step design. We see that in the desktop context menu and the taskbar to name a few vital pieces of the operating system. 

Do the interface designers actually use Windows day to day? Who knows, lol. Maybe most of Microsoft is using Apple devices or Linux these days, lol. 

The Github page.

Thankfully, someone called aouronga on GitHub wrote a BAT file to get the job done. I had to uncomment out the delays they had to get it working. I tried experimenting with a fraction of a second, but I'm not sure it uses a number like 0.8 seconds properly so I switched it back to 1 second each. 

Here is the modified script: 

@echo off 
start ms-settings:nightlight 
timeout /t 1 /nobreak >nul 
powershell -command "$wshell = New-Object -ComObject wscript.shell; $wshell.SendKeys('{ENTER}')" 
timeout /t 1 /nobreak >nul 
powershell -command "Get-Process | Where-Object { $_.MainWindowTitle -like 'Settings' } | ForEach-Object { $_.CloseMainWindow() }" 

Windows file explorer address bar.

Steps I took: 

1. Create your own .bat file with this code or download it from Github.
2. Put your BAT file in a folder in your user directory. You can go to it by typing in %USERPROFILE% into a file explorer's address bar or a path like C:\Users\[username] assuming that's your OS drive letter and you'd replace [username] with your actual one. 
3. I created a shortcut of that BAT file. In the case of windows 11 you have to right-click, select "Show more options", and then select "Create shortcut". I changed the shortcut's icon to a star so it's more noticeable. You can also hold the SHIFT key on your keyboard down while right-clicking the BAT file to get the original Windows context menu to show up immediately. 
4. I cut-copied the shortcut and placed it into %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs or something like C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs
1. Placing files here shouldn't require admin permissions. 
5. To pin the shortcut to the start menu, select Pinned, All > and then find the shortcut in the list. Right-click on that one and select "Pin to Start". 

All > list in the Start menu. (located where "< Back" is before the click)

To change the shortcut's icon you can right-click on the shortcut and select Properties. From there you can adjust the name or select "Change Icon..." from the Shortcut tab. My star is from SHELL32.dll.

Optionally, you can put the shortcut into C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs

but keep in mind that you will need to have admin access to place a file there. You should also put the BAT file itself into a global folder that isn't in a specific user's directory. 

To adjust the intensity you will need to go into Settings > System > Display > Night light. As far as I can tell this is saved and will work with the shortcut. 

That's one inconvenience somewhat dealt with. Now if I could get the start menu itself only on my secondary monitor...