In Win+R dialog you don’t see a list of installed programs. That list contains programs that were recently launched through that dialog.
That list is kept in the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RunMRU
The format is obvious: a
-z
values are command lines, MRUList
value is the sequence of a
-z
keys recently launched, in the order.
However, it’s completely undocumented and unsupported. If I were you, I wouldn’t mess with the data in that key because it’s Windows’ implementation details. Just place a shortcut to your program somewhere in %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu
, and you’ll be able to start typing the name of your program after Win key, without the “R”.