How to Delete a File on Windows 11

This tutorial is divided into multiple sections, because there are multiple ways to delete a file.

Context Menu

To delete a file using the context menu on Windows, follow the following steps:

1: navigate to the folder where the file that you want to delete is located.

2: right click on the file that you want to delete to display its context menu.

3: select the option "Delete." It has a trash bin for its icon.

On Windows 11, the file will be immediately deleted by default. Previous version of Windows used to ask for confirmation.¹

By default, "deleting" a file through the File Explorer will send it to a special location called the trash bin or recycle bin where the file will be preserved temporarily. This allows you to "undelete" a file in case you deleted it by mistake. It's possible to "permanently" delete the file by emptying your trash bin or by accessing the trash bin and specifically deleting the file. A "permanently" deleted file may still be recoverable by data recovery experts in some cases.

Keyboard Shortcut

It's also possible to delete a file by selecting it and then pressing the Delete key on the keyboard.

Observation: it's rather easy to trigger this by accident, and there is no warning if you accidentally delete a file since it doesn't ask you for confirmation. It seems there is a way to make the File Explorer ask for confirmation before deleting, so maybe you should enable this setting to avoid an accident in the future.

It's possible to "permanently" delete a file skipping the recycle bin through the keyboard shortcut [Shift+Delete key].

Drag and Drop

It's possible to delete a file by dragging and dropping it into the recycle bin. The process is the same as moving the file to inside a folder. See [How to Move a File on Windows 11] for a complete tutorial.