Hi, Windhawk author here. Nice to see it on Hacker News.
This is just one Windhawk mod, submitted by a community member. There are hundreds others. Windhawk was created to simplify Windows customization and to make it more accessible, both for developers and users. For a more detailed introduction, check out the Windhawk release blog post:
Thanks for making this a safe place to modify Windows in a community-driven fashion. I mentioned it in a comment below, but I use the "Multirow taskbar for Windows 11" mod and it's been a godsend for keeping things more organized as before. I appreciate you and the mod community.
I've come across Windhawk before but the mods being just C++ programs seemed a little suspicious to me, how do you make sure the mods dont include malware?
When you install or run a program, how do you make sure it doesn't include malware? I assume that you check for the author's record/reputation, and perhaps look at the source code if it's available.
It's similar with Windhawk mods. The GitHub and X profiles are verified to be the profiles of the author, so you can decide whether you trust them. The source code is available, so you can inspect it as well. Mods are single-file and usually short, which makes it easier to review than an average program.
Windhawk mods are distributed as source code and WH itself compiles it. It works the same way usescripts work with tampermonkey/violentmonkey on browsers.
If a mod includes malware it'll be very obvious as mods are usually small.
Windows is weird. The way these mods work is injecting code into different processes, which is a very common malware technique. Keyloggers in particular work similarly to Windhawk. And that is not a swipe at Windhawk, that is just how Windows has you do this type of thing.
Can't speak for this product but disabling a lot of the animations, gradients, shadows & visual effects has made Windows 11 run significantly better on the computers I have it on. They didn't seem to add much value anyways.
I'm a fan of a lot of the user experience improvements being made in Windows over the last decade, such as Terminal, running Linux, Power Toys features, screenshots & recording, Paint finally getting layers, window management & more.
At the same time, I'm still not sure why we needed Windows 11 as the only good updates seem like they could have been done without it. All the visual changes have seemed to cause bugs & performance issues on relatively high powered PCs (64GB+ memory, m2 ssd drives, latest gen mid level GPU & CPU)
It seems the Windows ME, Vista, etc experiment continues to live on.
Disabling animations makes everything better no matter the OS.
When executing a sequence of actions, not having to wait 100-300ms for the device to show some random animation before inputing the next action is a time saver and a removes the "why is my computer/phone wasting my time" feeling.
Human reaction time is around 200ms but in a sequence of actions, we don't need visual feedback to move to the next action; it's just muscle memory and we can reach pretty low delay between inputs if the OS and apps do not impede us.
Back to Windows, I'm quite sad that 24H2 removed support for the legacy app switcher (alt-tab). It was very low latency and operated well in many high-load situations. The new one works okay but is not as snappy and can take a bit of time to show up under load. Plus I prefer the old style (smaller box, no need for eye movement to check its content).
I agree there are many bad timer-waster animations. But animations can be a good thing. Take scrolling as an example. Pressing page-down on a text-page or in a text-editor, without animation, it takes me a lot of time and energy to find the place where I left off reading or editing before scrolling. A good animation can save a lot of time here. It's similar with other operations -- and I agree that those operations that we don't do that often tend to be the ones that profit more from animation, while the ones where we already know in advance what will happen can be made worse by animation. I think an animation should never slow down the user, they should not be blocking. An unfinished animation should not prevent the user from typing the next action.
Even if you are talking about the entire loop, that sounds pretty high. Maybe if its moving your hands in reaction to an unexpected stimulus in your feet...
We can tell the difference between 60fps (~16ms per frame) and 120fps (~8ms per frame). Any more than that is a noticeable amount of waiting.
It does get complicated, though. What if the information is presented immediately, then animated? Well, that's where a complete measurement of reaction time would be relevant.
Even so, as you pointed out, we often predict what we will be doing in advance, and can perform a sequence of learned actions much more quickly. If there is a delay imposed before you can perform an action, then you must learn the delay, too. That learning process involves making mistakes (attempting the action before the animation is over), which is extra frustrating, considering how unnecessary it is.
Not exactly alt-tab but it’s a ui-less immediate switcher (snappy af, zero latency) to switch between windows of the same app with alt-backtick (next to escape), originally a macOS feature: https://neosmart.net/EasySwitch/
The Win11 screenshot tool is a travesty. It now takes multiple seconds to initialize, plus additional delay in actually selecting what you want to capture. The previous iteration was instantaneous. I have lost many opportunities to screenshot something from a screen share because of this trash performance.
I agree, even on fast hardware there is a lot of unnecessary delay trying to take a screenshot.
My old workflow from the Win2k/XP days was: Print Screen, Win + R, type mspaint, Enter, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+S, Enter, done. Still feels faster than watching my screen fade in and out for the snipping tool.
They probably had to go to 11 (unlike Spinal Tap, Microsoft's 11 isn't awesome) because they added the TPM requirement. If a computer was Windows 10 compatible but not Windows 10 version 24Hblahblah, it would confuse the average user...
Instead they can throw away their perfectly good computer and buy the confusion as a single package! Relax, the climate can take it!
Classic Windows (95-7) was the best era for Windows and always will be the best in terms of GUI. Everything that came after 7 has been a downgrade from 7's GUI.
If you run emulated Windows 98 in the browser with e.g. v86, it is faster to open the start menu on the emulated Windows 98 than on the real Windows 11 running it. Windows user experience really went downhill after 7.
It's incredible the effort Windows 10/11 users will go to in order to reach a somewhat functional and reliable computing experience via third party modifications, yet Linux is somehow too much effort. Just look at the instructions on that page..
A foolish take, makes me believe you didn't really work in the real world. Because the entire global computer ecosystem is built on Windows-compatible software. Finance, accounting, medical, car diagnostics, and even HVAC software are built windows-compatible-only only.
Don't get me wrong, I use Xubuntu on my crappy old devices, Ubuntu on my secondary mini-pc, and switch between them with KVM while working. I tried to make Linux work for everything but missing industry software made it difficult.
Don’t bother. HN has a very hard anti-Microsoft bias, especially when it comes to Windows. At the same time will completely overlook many of the same warts or different warts that exist on macOS or Linux because they get a free pass for some reason.
Despite its flaws Windows still remains a very capable workhorse general purpose OS, and with WSL dev is a non issue. Hell, having actual Linux is better than the macOS Frankenstein Unix and homrbrew
For some it's just fun. Changing things because we can. I was a huge tinkerer in the XP days, I'd test out every tweak and tool I could get my hands on and would reinstall the OS every couple months. I'd use Resource Hacker to change out the XP flag icons, put my initials on the start button, etc. It wasn't about making it more usable so much as it was just making it mine.
It makes me happy to see newer generations still doing the same stuff, granted its much more complex to do this work on Win11 vs XP.
I wish there was a "power user" mode in Windows that you could activate and you'd get the ability to have classic themes (my MS themselves), classic Control Panel, no constant nudging, no weather/Xbox/Solitaire apps, etc...
THe settings siutation is so annoying, there are still so many options locked away inside control panel and the new settings app has a few that dont exist in control panel, its so fragmented.
They tried that during the Chicago development and discarded the idea due to multiple problems with how humans work.
Two different UIs meant that you had to learn them separately, you didn't have a slow ramp from one to the other, one familiar with one could get stuck on the other with no knowledge of how to get back, divided efforts between the two, etc.
Not quite what you are asking for, but closer to Win95 shipping with progman.exe which could allow someone to cosplay Win3.11 while running Win95.
And yet they seem to have lost all that knowledge from Win8 onwards. WinForms, WPF, UWP, WinUI, MAUI... All of these with their own metaphores, design language, and they all feel half-baked, full of bugs.
I find the various privacy and 'feature' disabling scripts/utilities questionable for a similar reason, it's moving outside of the expected behavior of the OS for how applications and future MS updates expect things to work. The core issue seems to be you're working against what MS want and they provide a moving target, functionally it's their system, not yours.
I imagine it would be frustrating to be the windows shell dev who has to investigate the torrent of bizarre memory corruption bugs that inevitably occur on Windhawk users’ machines after major OS updates. There’s really no avoiding it when you detour unstable “implementation detail” sort of functions across the taskbar/systray/start/etc. especially now that c++ coroutines are in widespread usage therein.
But to be fair, I understand the demand for products like this, because of several painful feature takebacks between 10 -> 11. It would be nice if cleaner approaches like wholesale shell replacement were still as straightforward as they were prior to windows 8. The “immersive shell” infra running in explorer + the opaque nature of enumerating installed UWPs + a bunch of other things make that almost impossible today.
> I imagine it would be frustrating to be the windows shell dev who has to investigate the torrent of bizarre memory corruption bugs that inevitably occur on Windhawk users’ machines after major OS updates.
What makes you think they will be bothered to investigate other's people bugs, when they don't investigate even their own ?
From what I've learned: stuff like this makes up a not insignificant portion of the crash reports that come through. This results in crash dumps that are useless at best because they just look like memory corruption or badly written malware. In my discussions with folks about this, an annoying number of people who run this sort of software either a) do not care that it makes developing Windows harder for the devs or b) actively want the usable signal for the Windows development teams to be low.
Me too! The Aero effect still holds up great today IMO.
Kind of fun to imagine some hybrid between Aero and Apple's new glass effect. Imagine if Aero could "bend light" instead of just applying a blur effect.
I've tried these things before. Use with caution, and definitely not on a work device. They never fully uninstall and you might be left with incorrect registry keys and other weirdness. May break updates as well.
I've had good success with Total Uninstall for this problem (with software in general). It does a diff of your registry and filesystem before/after installing an app, and after uninstall highlights lingering remnants. Over time you and it "learn" to filter out background changes unrelated to the install process.
No, Windhawk's rule for all mods is that they do not permanent changes, including to the registry. Disabling the mod and rebooting will erase all effects.
I don't need one. Look into how this stuff works. It's a pile of scripts and registry edits. It's very sloppy. Windows isn't Linux. The OS does not expect the user to do stuff like this and it's not built for it. This is how you get the "windows sucks it's always weird and broken" type people. Sure, you can do it, but you WILL have goofy unexplained problems if you mod your system with this stuff. If you want windows to be stable, stop fucking with it.
I've had to return to Windows for my daily work after 20 years mostly away from it. I already knew about a lot of UI and functionality regressions, but when you truly experience the defective mess that Windows has become... it's hard to take.
So while I'd love to install this mod, it seems way too fraught with potential side-effects. But it looks like there might be some minor, safe mods to explore here.
Here's one gallingly dumb thing Windows does now that I wonder if you guys can recommend a fix to: If you hover over an application's icons in the taskbar, it pops up thumbnails of the app's open windows and forces you to choose ONE. WTF. I want to bring ALL of the application's windows to the front. It's incredible that clicking on the application's icon (instead of one thumbnail) doesn't do this. Instead, it does NOTHING. Is there a fix for this?
Yeah, it would be so much better if it was American-made, because as everyone knows there are no corrupt people in the US and every person of Russian descent is a spy for their motherland's government (:
Yes, it would be better if it was American made, because the US government has lesser capability to compell otherwise independent developers to do their bidding.
Why such a simple UI utility app needed a VSCodium/Electron UI? The author seems to be well versed in Win32 API, so why not just learn the GUI part as well? It's not that hard.
Hi, Windhawk author here. Nice to see it on Hacker News.
This is just one Windhawk mod, submitted by a community member. There are hundreds others. Windhawk was created to simplify Windows customization and to make it more accessible, both for developers and users. For a more detailed introduction, check out the Windhawk release blog post:
https://ramensoftware.com/windhawk
Thanks for making this a safe place to modify Windows in a community-driven fashion. I mentioned it in a comment below, but I use the "Multirow taskbar for Windows 11" mod and it's been a godsend for keeping things more organized as before. I appreciate you and the mod community.
How do you know it's safe?
1 reply →
I've come across Windhawk before but the mods being just C++ programs seemed a little suspicious to me, how do you make sure the mods dont include malware?
When you install or run a program, how do you make sure it doesn't include malware? I assume that you check for the author's record/reputation, and perhaps look at the source code if it's available.
It's similar with Windhawk mods. The GitHub and X profiles are verified to be the profiles of the author, so you can decide whether you trust them. The source code is available, so you can inspect it as well. Mods are single-file and usually short, which makes it easier to review than an average program.
3 replies →
Windhawk mods are distributed as source code and WH itself compiles it. It works the same way usescripts work with tampermonkey/violentmonkey on browsers.
If a mod includes malware it'll be very obvious as mods are usually small.
5 replies →
Windows is weird. The way these mods work is injecting code into different processes, which is a very common malware technique. Keyloggers in particular work similarly to Windhawk. And that is not a swipe at Windhawk, that is just how Windows has you do this type of thing.
5 replies →
FUD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt
I'm so sick of people telling me to BE AFRAID. If you want to live without the risk of a little danger, go live in prison.
7 replies →
thank you for making modern windows usable - it has made the transition from xp/7 to 10/11 more tolerable
Can't speak for this product but disabling a lot of the animations, gradients, shadows & visual effects has made Windows 11 run significantly better on the computers I have it on. They didn't seem to add much value anyways.
I'm a fan of a lot of the user experience improvements being made in Windows over the last decade, such as Terminal, running Linux, Power Toys features, screenshots & recording, Paint finally getting layers, window management & more.
At the same time, I'm still not sure why we needed Windows 11 as the only good updates seem like they could have been done without it. All the visual changes have seemed to cause bugs & performance issues on relatively high powered PCs (64GB+ memory, m2 ssd drives, latest gen mid level GPU & CPU)
It seems the Windows ME, Vista, etc experiment continues to live on.
Disabling animations makes everything better no matter the OS.
When executing a sequence of actions, not having to wait 100-300ms for the device to show some random animation before inputing the next action is a time saver and a removes the "why is my computer/phone wasting my time" feeling.
Human reaction time is around 200ms but in a sequence of actions, we don't need visual feedback to move to the next action; it's just muscle memory and we can reach pretty low delay between inputs if the OS and apps do not impede us.
Back to Windows, I'm quite sad that 24H2 removed support for the legacy app switcher (alt-tab). It was very low latency and operated well in many high-load situations. The new one works okay but is not as snappy and can take a bit of time to show up under load. Plus I prefer the old style (smaller box, no need for eye movement to check its content).
I agree there are many bad timer-waster animations. But animations can be a good thing. Take scrolling as an example. Pressing page-down on a text-page or in a text-editor, without animation, it takes me a lot of time and energy to find the place where I left off reading or editing before scrolling. A good animation can save a lot of time here. It's similar with other operations -- and I agree that those operations that we don't do that often tend to be the ones that profit more from animation, while the ones where we already know in advance what will happen can be made worse by animation. I think an animation should never slow down the user, they should not be blocking. An unfinished animation should not prevent the user from typing the next action.
1 reply →
Have you looked into SimpleWindowSwitcher? https://github.com/sigoden/window-switcher
ExplorerPatcher makes it easy to configure in the settings menu, I'm not aware of any other projects that implement SWS: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
It's very fast and can be configured to set window thumbnail size/area
3 replies →
> Human reaction time is around 200ms
Even if you are talking about the entire loop, that sounds pretty high. Maybe if its moving your hands in reaction to an unexpected stimulus in your feet...
We can tell the difference between 60fps (~16ms per frame) and 120fps (~8ms per frame). Any more than that is a noticeable amount of waiting.
It does get complicated, though. What if the information is presented immediately, then animated? Well, that's where a complete measurement of reaction time would be relevant.
Even so, as you pointed out, we often predict what we will be doing in advance, and can perform a sequence of learned actions much more quickly. If there is a delay imposed before you can perform an action, then you must learn the delay, too. That learning process involves making mistakes (attempting the action before the animation is over), which is extra frustrating, considering how unnecessary it is.
2 replies →
Not exactly alt-tab but it’s a ui-less immediate switcher (snappy af, zero latency) to switch between windows of the same app with alt-backtick (next to escape), originally a macOS feature: https://neosmart.net/EasySwitch/
(Backwards navigation with alt-shift-backtick)
2 replies →
The Win11 screenshot tool is a travesty. It now takes multiple seconds to initialize, plus additional delay in actually selecting what you want to capture. The previous iteration was instantaneous. I have lost many opportunities to screenshot something from a screen share because of this trash performance.
I agree, even on fast hardware there is a lot of unnecessary delay trying to take a screenshot.
My old workflow from the Win2k/XP days was: Print Screen, Win + R, type mspaint, Enter, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+S, Enter, done. Still feels faster than watching my screen fade in and out for the snipping tool.
1 reply →
I've been using the open source ShareX screenshot tool: https://getsharex.com/
Win+Print = takes screenshot and saves to Pictures/Screenshots/
Pressing Shift+Win+S is pretty instantaneous for taking screenshots, you don't need to open the tool.
alt-prtscn still works to take screenshot of active window instantly
They probably had to go to 11 (unlike Spinal Tap, Microsoft's 11 isn't awesome) because they added the TPM requirement. If a computer was Windows 10 compatible but not Windows 10 version 24Hblahblah, it would confuse the average user...
Instead they can throw away their perfectly good computer and buy the confusion as a single package! Relax, the climate can take it!
Classic Windows (95-7) was the best era for Windows and always will be the best in terms of GUI. Everything that came after 7 has been a downgrade from 7's GUI.
If you run emulated Windows 98 in the browser with e.g. v86, it is faster to open the start menu on the emulated Windows 98 than on the real Windows 11 running it. Windows user experience really went downhill after 7.
It's incredible the effort Windows 10/11 users will go to in order to reach a somewhat functional and reliable computing experience via third party modifications, yet Linux is somehow too much effort. Just look at the instructions on that page..
Every techie knows about Linux by now. Not everyone chooses to use Windows because they're foolish or don't know any better
why do they choose it?
i have a windows workstation because one CNC machine that we use needs it. only other reason i can see is gaming?
I have all 3 major OSs at home and, honestly, Windows 11 is stuff of nightmares to me
10 replies →
A foolish take, makes me believe you didn't really work in the real world. Because the entire global computer ecosystem is built on Windows-compatible software. Finance, accounting, medical, car diagnostics, and even HVAC software are built windows-compatible-only only.
Don't get me wrong, I use Xubuntu on my crappy old devices, Ubuntu on my secondary mini-pc, and switch between them with KVM while working. I tried to make Linux work for everything but missing industry software made it difficult.
Don’t bother. HN has a very hard anti-Microsoft bias, especially when it comes to Windows. At the same time will completely overlook many of the same warts or different warts that exist on macOS or Linux because they get a free pass for some reason.
Despite its flaws Windows still remains a very capable workhorse general purpose OS, and with WSL dev is a non issue. Hell, having actual Linux is better than the macOS Frankenstein Unix and homrbrew
1 reply →
Some of us still rely on Windows applications that either don’t run on Linux, can’t run under Wine, or don’t have alternatives that meet our needs.
For some it's just fun. Changing things because we can. I was a huge tinkerer in the XP days, I'd test out every tweak and tool I could get my hands on and would reinstall the OS every couple months. I'd use Resource Hacker to change out the XP flag icons, put my initials on the start button, etc. It wasn't about making it more usable so much as it was just making it mine.
It makes me happy to see newer generations still doing the same stuff, granted its much more complex to do this work on Win11 vs XP.
"but he's sweet sometimes"
It's just an abusive relationship and eventually some of them break out of it.
Yeah, that effectively describes my experiences with desktop linux.
Linux isn’t hard, it’s just different. Better, but different. That’s too much effort for some.
Most of us are forced to use it because of corporate IT requirements.
In Linux such kind of hacking is impossible at all. You cannot make Qt4 to look like Qt3.
Windows 11 user here. I use zero third-party modifications. Some people are masochists.
Indeed, some people are :)
I wish there was a "power user" mode in Windows that you could activate and you'd get the ability to have classic themes (my MS themselves), classic Control Panel, no constant nudging, no weather/Xbox/Solitaire apps, etc...
Windows' GOD mode CLSID:
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/create-master-control-panel-g...
THe settings siutation is so annoying, there are still so many options locked away inside control panel and the new settings app has a few that dont exist in control panel, its so fragmented.
I find myself reaching for the Control Panel all the time in Windows 11. I won't go into the main settings panel unless it's the only way.
They tried that during the Chicago development and discarded the idea due to multiple problems with how humans work.
Two different UIs meant that you had to learn them separately, you didn't have a slow ramp from one to the other, one familiar with one could get stuck on the other with no knowledge of how to get back, divided efforts between the two, etc.
Not quite what you are asking for, but closer to Win95 shipping with progman.exe which could allow someone to cosplay Win3.11 while running Win95.
And yet they seem to have lost all that knowledge from Win8 onwards. WinForms, WPF, UWP, WinUI, MAUI... All of these with their own metaphores, design language, and they all feel half-baked, full of bugs.
I used to use Stardock WindowBlinds to do something similar, but it leads to all sorts of weird compatibility issues with various applications.
I wonder if this will have the same issues?
I find the various privacy and 'feature' disabling scripts/utilities questionable for a similar reason, it's moving outside of the expected behavior of the OS for how applications and future MS updates expect things to work. The core issue seems to be you're working against what MS want and they provide a moving target, functionally it's their system, not yours.
I imagine it would be frustrating to be the windows shell dev who has to investigate the torrent of bizarre memory corruption bugs that inevitably occur on Windhawk users’ machines after major OS updates. There’s really no avoiding it when you detour unstable “implementation detail” sort of functions across the taskbar/systray/start/etc. especially now that c++ coroutines are in widespread usage therein.
But to be fair, I understand the demand for products like this, because of several painful feature takebacks between 10 -> 11. It would be nice if cleaner approaches like wholesale shell replacement were still as straightforward as they were prior to windows 8. The “immersive shell” infra running in explorer + the opaque nature of enumerating installed UWPs + a bunch of other things make that almost impossible today.
> I imagine it would be frustrating to be the windows shell dev who has to investigate the torrent of bizarre memory corruption bugs that inevitably occur on Windhawk users’ machines after major OS updates.
What makes you think they will be bothered to investigate other's people bugs, when they don't investigate even their own ?
From what I've learned: stuff like this makes up a not insignificant portion of the crash reports that come through. This results in crash dumps that are useless at best because they just look like memory corruption or badly written malware. In my discussions with folks about this, an annoying number of people who run this sort of software either a) do not care that it makes developing Windows harder for the devs or b) actively want the usable signal for the Windows development teams to be low.
There are mods that hook only WINAPI functions.
Been playing around with this, it's more consistent than Windows 11's UI itself
I also do miss the Windows 7 Aero theme.
Me too! The Aero effect still holds up great today IMO.
Kind of fun to imagine some hybrid between Aero and Apple's new glass effect. Imagine if Aero could "bend light" instead of just applying a blur effect.
Windhawk has a Windows 11 Taskbar Styler with Aero theme:
https://github.com/ramensoftware/windows-11-taskbar-styling-...
https://sourceforge.net/projects/nights-in-the-forest-script... https://sourceforge.net/projects/nights-in-the-forest-script... https://sourceforge.net/projects/roblox-nights-script-auto-f... https://sourceforge.net/projects/nights-in-the-forest-script... https://sourceforge.net/projects/nights-in-the-forest-script... https://sourceforge.net/projects/nights-in-the-forest-script... https://sourceforge.net/projects/copy-trading-bot/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/delta-executor-roblox/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/nexus-roblox-executor/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/solana-turbo-trader/ ban this sourceforge pages , this all of malware please anyone
Wow, quite a lot of work, but the end result looks amazing!
The description of how this works gave my inner ops guy a panic attack. I love this kind of hack.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/windhawk/ this software is completely safe it is even available on sourceforge
This is malware, the project is on github
I've tried these things before. Use with caution, and definitely not on a work device. They never fully uninstall and you might be left with incorrect registry keys and other weirdness. May break updates as well.
They never fully uninstall
Ugh, you'd think we'd be better by now.
I've had good success with Total Uninstall for this problem (with software in general). It does a diff of your registry and filesystem before/after installing an app, and after uninstall highlights lingering remnants. Over time you and it "learn" to filter out background changes unrelated to the install process.
No, Windhawk's rule for all mods is that they do not permanent changes, including to the registry. Disabling the mod and rebooting will erase all effects.
windhawk patches stuff in memory, so the changes won't remain if you just disable its service and reboot
Do you have a specific example that broke update and didn't fully uninstall?
I don't need one. Look into how this stuff works. It's a pile of scripts and registry edits. It's very sloppy. Windows isn't Linux. The OS does not expect the user to do stuff like this and it's not built for it. This is how you get the "windows sucks it's always weird and broken" type people. Sure, you can do it, but you WILL have goofy unexplained problems if you mod your system with this stuff. If you want windows to be stable, stop fucking with it.
1 reply →
This is so neat looking. Is there an equivalent for MacOS?
Not exactly afaik, but I've recently been going to System Settings > Accessibility > Display, and turning on:
https://imgur.com/a/DqfN07k
I like the retro and simple vibe compared to the new Liquid Glass controls.
Ah! Thank you! Even on Sequoia this is a massive improvement!
1 reply →
Would love to see someone running this theme + a tiling window manager!
I've had to return to Windows for my daily work after 20 years mostly away from it. I already knew about a lot of UI and functionality regressions, but when you truly experience the defective mess that Windows has become... it's hard to take.
So while I'd love to install this mod, it seems way too fraught with potential side-effects. But it looks like there might be some minor, safe mods to explore here.
Here's one gallingly dumb thing Windows does now that I wonder if you guys can recommend a fix to: If you hover over an application's icons in the taskbar, it pops up thumbnails of the app's open windows and forces you to choose ONE. WTF. I want to bring ALL of the application's windows to the front. It's incredible that clicking on the application's icon (instead of one thumbnail) doesn't do this. Instead, it does NOTHING. Is there a fix for this?
You might want to check out this mod: Taskbar minimize/restore on scroll
https://windhawk.net/mods/taskbar-button-scroll
Looks like that might do it. Thanks!
> The mod injects only in the process Winlogon.exe, and exits once the handle of the memory area is closed. It does not hook any functions.
Yep. Sure. Going to let a Russian utility fuck with winlogon.exe. Excellent idea.
Yeah, it would be so much better if it was American-made, because as everyone knows there are no corrupt people in the US and every person of Russian descent is a spy for their motherland's government (:
Yes, it would be better if it was American made, because the US government has lesser capability to compell otherwise independent developers to do their bidding.
6 replies →
That was my first concern too, but it does look like you can build the binary from source:
https://github.com/ramensoftware/windhawk
Why such a simple UI utility app needed a VSCodium/Electron UI? The author seems to be well versed in Win32 API, so why not just learn the GUI part as well? It's not that hard.
4 replies →
Doesn't mean it's safe.
7 replies →
And the author is a security/malware researcher. Yeah, you might want to pass.
Both the mod's author and Windhawk's autor live in Israel, if it makes you feel more safe.
just add the r===ain keyboard to input sources and you will be fine.
>fuck with winlogon.exe. Excellent idea.
That's mostly irrelevant because all the thing baddies want to do with your computer, they can do without touching winlogon or even getting admin.
https://xkcd.com/1200/
Look at the top of this page. It says "hacker news".