The beauty and terror of modding Windows
windowsread.me

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105 points

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wild_pointer

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13 hours ago

89 comments

gus_massa ・ 11 hours ago

Somewhat related:

A long time ago, I used "7+ Taskbar Tweaker" that added a lot of nice things to Windows 7, like reordering the tasks in the taskbar. Now I'm remembering that the best feature was to ungroup the windows of the same task, that was super nice to edit two documents in Word

It used a lot of magic, probably overwriting dll calls in the kernel of Windows. It looks like it only partially support Windows 11 https://ramensoftware.com/7-taskbar-tweaker

  • tencentshill ・ 8 hours ago

    It's by the same developer, m417z.

  • user_7832 ・ 10 hours ago

    > A long time ago, I used "7+ Taskbar Tweaker"…

    Way to make me feel old! I'm still using it!

    > …to Windows 7

    Aah that's better.

    The tool still works on 10 btw, and offers some options not available otherwise - eg properly narrow taskbar when vertical (about small icon width wide).

  • krige ・ 10 hours ago

    Wasn't that taskbar/windows thing just a toggle in official taskbar settings?

operator-name ・ 12 hours ago

I’ve been using WindHawk for a bit, and my favourite mods have been:

- Slick Window Arrangement (better window snapping): https://windhawk.net/mods/slick-window-arrangement

- Better file sizes in Explorer details: https://windhawk.net/mods/explorer-details-better-file-sizes

  • fifticon ・ 11 hours ago

    file sizes in explorer is my pet peeve, it should be a builtin. When I am coding and making small projects, I want to see the bytes. I hate that everything is shown as "1 or 2 k". and it is a hazzle to get access to and install of the mods that show bytes column. It should just be an extra column available by default 'Byte Size'.

    • RGamma ・ 11 hours ago

      Or automatic column width. Or even setting the same column widths for all folders (try it, it's tough without 3rd party tools). Or the UI hangs with network folders. Or the search that never finds anything. I could go on...

      • layer8 ・ 10 hours ago
        ・ 4 more

        For the first item, there’s at least a keyboard shortcut that I use regularly: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121030-00/?p=62...

        • RGamma ・ 10 hours ago
          ・ 3 more

          It would take one teeny tiny setting to always do this, yet it seems so far away...

          • layer8 ・ 8 hours ago
            ・ 2 more

            As an approximation, you could use AutoHotKey to have the key press sent every 200ms when an Explorer window has focus. ;)

            Personally, I wouldn’t want to have it automatically, because sometimes you have really long file names, or other columns that can get arbitrarily wide. There would also have to be a configurable maximum column width.

            • RGamma ・ 7 hours ago

              Nah no workaround. I'll take the hit until I can switch to something better on my work PC. Several decisions Microsoft has taken make it more likely that I'll invest the time. May as well try to un-Microsoft my org (at least to the degree I'm involved) while I'm at it.

robmccoll ・ 12 hours ago

If you want tweaks that are a little more first party, there's always PowerToys https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

  • raincole ・ 11 hours ago

    I feel like it's for a totally different purpose though. The thing mentioned in this article seems to aim for changing how Windows' windows management and taskbar work completely.

  • layer8 ・ 10 hours ago

    PowerToys are more like separate utility programs, rather than the UI tweaks that WindHawk mods do by hooking into Explorer and the like.

  • jeremycarter ・ 12 hours ago

    There are genuinely some great power toys available.

    • timpera ・ 11 hours ago

      Definitely! I couldn't live without the "Quick Accent" PowerToys to quickly add accents that don't exist on my keyboard, I use it hundreds of times a day.

      • MaanuAir ・ 3 hours ago

        Me too, but it is so unreliable laggy, I sometimes have to wait 2 secs or more for the menu to appear, ruining the flow.

        And typing ALT 0151 to get an em dash, I mean seriously?

        For someone typing accents and em + en dashes on purpose — well before it becomes an AI’s trait — it’s so infuriating, I can’t believe people type books on Windows. All this while macOS solved this, built in the OS, since ages now…

    • greggsy ・ 10 hours ago

      Can’t live without CmdPal.

blindstitch ・ 11 hours ago

By the time I stopped using windows 10 on my daily driver last year I had 6 tweak apps always running to smooth over the endless papercuts. Now that I'm on KDE I don't have to run anything, it's all doable via stock control panels.

  • reddalo ・ 11 hours ago

    Me too. I'm on Linux Mint now and I love how simple, fast but also customizable it is.

    If it's not for some specific games or programs, I don't see a single reason to still use Windows in 2026.

    • aquariusDue ・ 10 hours ago

      Yeah, between KDE and Cinnamon I can focus on my work and have the desktop environment gently fade into the background. Though some get a similar feeling using stuff like i3, sway or Niri.

ChoGGi ・ 9 hours ago

This might be a place for an answer.

I've completely disabled explorer.exe from running; among other things it disables the win11 openwith dialog from opening. Replacing with the win10 onew orks, but it'll regularly be replaced with the 11 one by Windows. Any solutions?

  • joe_mamba ・ 8 hours ago

    Windows 11 has not been built to officially supporting that type of UI customisation out of the box, you're relying on hacks for that, not using official APIs.

    So since every major Windows update functions as a core OS reinstall, your hacked setup will be restored to a clean slate.

    You have two choices: Accept this limitation or move to another OS, there's no in-between.

stuffoverflow ・ 11 hours ago

I recently had the idea of somehow integrating Everything's folder size index to explorer and after failing to do it with claude code, I found out that Windhawk + Better file sizes does just that. I would have expected at least some performance degradation but in fact it was the opposite and made it feel much snappier. A huge QoL improvement to explorer that I've now installed to all my Windows PCs. Note that you need the alpha version (1.5) of Everything for best performance.

kace91 ・ 12 hours ago

>If you dig through Windows enthusiast communities

TIL those exist (genuinely).

I’ve never met anyone who likes windows, just people who put up with it for work/gaming and people who doesn’t care about the whole thing enough to move from the default (which is totally understandable).

  • mystifyingpoi ・ 11 hours ago

    There are people like this, although very small minority. I've met one at university - he was probably the first person to have Windows 8 laptop with a touchscreen, showing off to everyone how cool is was (at that time).

    He was also really good at Microsoft Word, unironically - he made extensive use of custom styling and could format an assignment paper in like 30 seconds. He was super useful in group projects.

    • skrebbel ・ 11 hours ago

      Wow it sounds like you're describing exactly me. All the way until the touchscreen laptop with Windows 8. Scary shit!

      I used to laugh at the LaTeX masochists in college spending 15 minutes just to put a picture where they wanted the picture to be. They had to add like four 1-character modifiers to the "insert image" command, each of which meant "yes, really here", "no, don't move it to the next page" and "nono, really really here".

      MS Word is properly great if you only use the custom style rules (basically CSS classes) at the paragraph level, and never directly apply styling (basically inline styles) except for super basic stuff like making a word italic. Has great referencing tools etc, fantastic formula editor and so on. And, well, you can use ultra modern human-machine interaction technology such as a mouse to choose where a picture goes and how big it is.

      (They might've enshittified it since; the last paper I wrote was in 2010 and Word was pretty damn decent back then)

      • Someone ・ 10 hours ago
        ・ 3 more

        > MS Word is properly great if you only use the custom style rules (basically CSS classes) at the paragraph level, and never directly apply styling (basically inline styles) except for super basic stuff like making a word italic

        MS word also has character styles (like a CSS style on a <span>). IMO you should use instead of bold or italic.

        (There are three more types of styles: linked, table and List. See https://office-watch.com/2022/word-five-types-styles/)

        • skrebbel ・ 9 hours ago
          ・ 2 more

          I'm aware, but Word's notorious "I clicked one button and it ruined the formatting of my entire document" stuff doesn't happen if you mark a word as italic or bold here and there in the middle of a sentence. The whole point of only using the style rules is to prevent it doing that.

          But yeah for layout, ie headings and the likes, only ever use the styles, never "bold, bigger bigger bigger". Don't touch the line spacing button, etc etc.

          IMO Word could do with a mode where those buttons are simply hidden. Want a bigger, fatter heading? Edit the heading style. There's no other way.

          • buescher ・ 3 hours ago

            You can turn almost all of those buttons off in the settings and save it as a template. The only complaint I ever got was from somone who wanted to use the highlighter instead of the built-in comment management system.

      • dismalaf ・ 3 hours ago

        LaTeX is probably annoying as a Word replacement however RMarkdown with embedded LaTeX saved me sooooo much time on my economics homework in university. Being able to put code, equations, graphs generated by said code, etc... all in one file then simply generate a PDF...

      • trympet ・ 11 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        Did you also have a windows 8 laptop with touch screen?

        • skrebbel ・ 11 hours ago

          Yep! Sorry I just edited that in. Win8 is thoroughly underrated to me. The file open/close dialogs were shit but the start menu was very good. I quite liked the fullscreen apps and am sad they got discontinued. Fullscreen IE browsing with full touch support (eg swipe for back/forward, no window chromes in the way to mis-click on etc) was very cool. It made every website feel like a fullscreen app. It almost made the terrible browser engine (it was still IE after all) bearable. Almost.

          I'm pretty much still on the same setup now, Win11 plus touchscreen. You'll pry my touchscreen out of my cold dead hands. How will I rage-close a "try chrome" popup without a touch screen? You ever try to rage click something with a touchpad? Total non starter.

  • bialpio ・ 12 hours ago

    I'm in the camp of liking Windows and having had to put up with Linux and MacOS for work. Inertia and familiarity does play a role, but as a dev there are things I really like (ETW + WinDbg immediately come to mind) & really miss on other OSes. I'm not there yet to join an enthusiast group though. ;)

  • bigfatkitten ・ 4 hours ago

    I would genuinely enjoy Windows (with WSL) if Microsoft didn’t go to special efforts to make the experience horrible by shoving useless AI functionality, or advertising down my throat.

  • raincole ・ 10 hours ago

    There are so many Windows users that even if the percentage of enthusiast users is only 10% of that of Mac, it's still quite a lot of people.

  • Telaneo ・ 9 hours ago

    I'm not sure these people like Windows as much as they like what it does for them, but they are willing to put in significant effort to remove the normal Windows roadblocks and annoyances, and thus are willing to hack and chop it to bits to get them closer to their end goals more quickly.

    They're not like a car enthusiast who loves their MX5 out of its sheer beauty and feel, but rather they love their SUV because of it's big boot and because it gets them where they need to be, and thus are perfectly happy to tear out the old radio and uncomfortable seats.

    The only difference is that car enthusiasts have many more options to choose from, while in OSes, if you're stuck with Windows, you're usually really stuck with it. Linux is certainly an option, but not one that is universally practical to apply.

    • expedition32 ・ 8 hours ago

      Why yes for me an OS is just something that I use to launch games, browsers and programs... Is that so strange? There is no Windows cult unlike Linux.

      For most people I'm sure computers are a tool not an identity.

  • matsemann ・ 10 hours ago

    That's honestly more narrow-minded by you, than those "not moving from the default". Maybe you're the one that never went deep into the rabbit-hole of what's possible, or actually properly learned to use the OS?

  • rererereferred ・ 8 hours ago

    I was a Windows modding enthusiast until I tried Linux and the modding there was superior (and then compiz appeared).

    These days whenever I use Windows I install bash and use a terminal so I don't really care about the window management, other than maximizing windows.

    • jasomill ・ 2 hours ago

      As of Windows 11, window management is one of the few things Windows does better than macOS or Linux desktop environments out of the box, thanks to the Windows+Z tiling feature.

      And then I use my touchpad to switch between virtual desktops and the jerky animation reminds me why I prefer to run non-game Windows applications remotely from a Mac.

  • RcouF1uZ4gsC ・ 12 hours ago

    There are probably more Windows enthusiasts than there are Linux enthusiasts in absolute numbers.

  • croisillon ・ 11 hours ago

    i can confess discovering XP back then made me actively like Windows ; that was a long time ago though and with each new version my liking has been reaching new abysses

  • Anonyneko ・ 10 hours ago

    I was thrilled for new Windows releases between 3.11 and 8.1. I'm still reasonably fond of Windows for personal use. For now I can still de-enshittify it enough to get back the experience I'm used to, and it's comfortable and convenient. But I'm not sure if that will last for long, given the current trend.

    That said, for work I've switched to Linux full-time years ago. Native containers are a killer feature for me, and the different UX and driver/dependency/repository issues aren't significant enough to make me want to go back to virtualization in Windows.

  • cyberax ・ 4 hours ago

    I loved hacking Windows back in 2000-s! It was super-hackable and had PLENTY of very thorough documentation (Petzold's "Programming Windows"!).

    You could even do a lot of kernel-level shenanigans with relative impunity thanks to its layered design. You could do some amazing stuff.

    As an example, SWSoft released container ("lightweight virtualization") support for Windows in 2005, before containers were even a thing in the mainline Linux. They did that by adding a layer of redirection on top of the kernel objects without having access to Windows source code.

  • johanneskanybal ・ 11 hours ago

    I mean not everyone cheers for the currently best soccer team either, it's partly about what you're invested in. If I had spent many years in Windows dev land I'm sure I would be arguing that side too.

  • jeremycarter ・ 12 hours ago

    [flagged]

    • kace91 ・ 11 hours ago

      >Is that a problem for you? Do you also act with bigotry over people who don't eat the same breakfast cereal as you?

      That’s… weirdly agressive. What about me stating I’ve never met a fan of X feels bigoted to you?

    • dghf ・ 11 hours ago

      How is it bigotry? I've never met anyone who likes, say, "Baby Shark" (well, anyone with an age in double-digits). I'd be surprised if many -- possibly any -- exist. But if they do, well, de gustibus non est disputandum. None of my business, and I bear no ill-will towards them.

    • mailund ・ 11 hours ago

      not sure how OP is acting with bigotry against windows users just because they were surprised that there are people who are enthusiastic about windows.

      I share their sentiment, it's like discovering that there is a group of people who are Internet Explorer fans, or avid listeners of the generic no-name pop songs specifically made to be unremarkable background music they play in my gym to avoid paying royalties. It's just surprising since I haven't met anyone who doesn't just treat it as something to either put up with or replace with alternatives before.

    • hackyhacky ・ 12 hours ago

      [flagged]

      • bialpio ・ 12 hours ago
        ・ 3 more

        Cereal is literally grass seeds so you may need to find a different analogy.

        • hackyhacky ・ 12 hours ago
          ・ 2 more

          So in your mind there is no difference between Frosted Flakes and grass? Okay.

robmccoll ・ 12 hours ago

Speaking of modding desktop environments, has anyone figured out how to get back the old border radius in macOS Tahoe?

wink ・ 10 hours ago

The most ridiculous thing is that you were simply able to move the taskbar in Win 10 for sure, in Win7 kinda sure and maybe longer... I still don't get why they thought removing this harmless feature would make sense.

  • noisem4ker ・ 8 hours ago

    The taskbar could be moved to any edge of the screen since its introduction in Windows 95.

chroma_zone ・ 5 hours ago

Having spent a few years trying to write Windows utility software, it is really exhausting to be in an antagonistic relationship with Microsoft and have their updates constantly break your work.

The article mentions ExplorerPatcher -- the changelog [1] of that project is informative. Every release involves fixing a bunch of things that Microsoft broke, intentionally or not. Some of this is understandable given how it (necessarily) messes with low level OS components, but there is still zero transparency and you just need to roll with whatever changes. I can't imagine doing that kind of work anymore.

[1] https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/releases

  • asveikau ・ 5 hours ago

    This seems to be about injecting your own code into a running process and then modifying its behavior. The kinds of things that would break from build to build are VERY DIFFERENT from what typical applications would face.

    • chroma_zone ・ 4 hours ago

      A lot of basic tweaks to windows behavior require those types of unstable hacks. The point is that developers or users who want to modify their system are forced into sketchy software.

chankstein38 ・ 2 hours ago

Man back in the XP days we used to just edit registry entries responsible for these things and use reshack to open binaries for modification.

fergie ・ 11 hours ago

Getting all of this to work on Windows seems like a bit of a thankless task. If customisability is important, why wouldn't you just go over to Linux?

  • hexage1814 ・ 10 hours ago

    As a windows power user myself, many of my workflows don't translate that easily. If you are an experienced Windows user, you probably have programs that you use on Windows and that aren't available for Linux. It's not that you couldn't theoretically translate that workflow into Linux, but boy, it would be a headache.

    To give an example: I use AutoHotkey, it's a scripting language for Windows that allows you to do a bunch of things. You can customize the keyboard, mouse, you can create menus and toolboxes, you can target specific applications inside. It's a fantastic tool. But it isn't available for Linux for obvious reasons; Linux is much more fragmented. You need like 3 or 5 different programs to achieve the same result in some cases, depending on your given script.

    In other words: debloating Windows and customizing it is considerably easier than installing Linux. Let alone some really good software you end up finding along the way: Everything, which is an amazing search program that allows you to create custom categories and the like. EmEditor, which is really good software to open and visualize really large text files, like it can open a 4GB txt with no problems.

    About the last sentence:

    >If customisability is important

    People value both things: customisability but also they value their time (of not having to come up with a new workflow), they value the programs and workflow they already learned to use through the years, and so on and so forth.

  • layer8 ・ 10 hours ago

    It’s less work on Windows for many things, and the system of UI events, hooks, and controls is more amenable to universal customization/automation than on Linux, which is more heterogeneous between applications, window managers and desktop environments.

  • c0balt ・ 10 hours ago

    Platform lock-in is powerful, from the M$ Office Suite to professional software for CAD up to Games

attentive ・ 2 hours ago

"Imagine moving the taskbar" - the state of 2026 windows is pathetic.

KingOfCoders ・ 5 hours ago

Windhawk vertical task bar is a game changer for me.

mschuster91 ・ 11 hours ago

> Windhawk makes me think about the future of Windows, too. Microsoft is talking about a “Windows Baseline Security Mode” that PCs will be in by default, only letting properly signed software run and forcing apps to ask for your permission when they access your files, webcam, microphone, and other resources. According to Microsoft, this will only be a default — you can choose to opt out.

Yeah, just as I can "choose" to root my Android phone. I can do that, yes, but the result will be that Netflix, banking apps and most games refuse to even start.

xtiansimon ・ 11 hours ago

The only tweak I’d be willing to venture over a janky rope bridge for is a tiling window that doesn’t focus-steal.

baal80spam ・ 12 hours ago

Never heard of Windhawk.

  • lproven ・ 11 hours ago

    This was news to me, too.

    But I rarely use Windows. I used to like it but for me XP was so ugly and bloated I switched to Linux and OS X full-time. I've never looked back.

    I just play occasionally to keep my skills vaguely current. Sometimes I need to work with it.

    Windows 11 is awful. Bloated, full of ads and nags, forcibly keeps your stuff in the crappy MS cloud drive for which there's no Linux GUI client.

    You can't even put the taskbar on the left edge where it belongs.

    Worse than Vista or Win ME or even Win 8.x.

    I moved all my emergency Windows partitions to Win10 IoT LTSC. Quite unbloated, proper local accounts, no Store, no Onedrive, no Modern apps at all. It's what Win10 should have been.

    And it's getting updates until 2032.

    So, Windhawk looks fun but I don't need it.

    • Hard_Space ・ 11 hours ago

      I moved all my LAN machines to IoT LTSC 2021 a year ago. Though I don’t regret it, be aware that update delay limits are the same as other Windows OS versions; that useful things like WSL2 will need installing from the app store to get the systemd version, and you’ll need to install the Windows app store from an enthusiast repo on Github; that Windows major version number is a fair way behind, affecting max Docker dated releases and same for many other frameworks; etc. It’s not that I meet a new limit every day, but certainly every few weeks.

      • lproven ・ 5 hours ago

        Interesting.

        I almost never use Windows, and I don't want things like WSL or Docker anyway. I mainly keep it around for things like upgrading firmware, occasionally flashing new ROMs onto phones, stuff like that.

        I tried the MyWhoosh virtual-cycling app on one of my boxes.

        https://mywhoosh.com/

        I was able to download and install the Windows Store direct from Microsoft with no problem at all.

        https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9wzdncrfjbmp?hl=en-GB&gl=I...

        (I just Googled that link -- it might not be the right one. MyWhoosh is only available on the Store. It refused to run on my elderly GPU anyway, though.)

        Thanks for the warning, though!

Grom_PE ・ 3 hours ago

Modding Windows is akin to building a sand castle. It might be fun, beautiful, but very much impermanent. You can expect it to be washed off with the next Windows update.

I've done it before on Windows 7. Resized system clock, resized start menu button, removed "Terminate batch job (Y/N)?" warning in cmd, etc.

Most annoying is that VirtualBox stops working with the patched uxtheme.dll.

...

Life on Linux is great. My modifications stick for as long as I want. Permanently if I get my patches upstream.

bakugo ・ 8 hours ago

> Windhawk may also cause serious problems with PC games that use anti-cheat software. On the project’s explanation page I just linked, there’s a description of how Windhawk hardcodes the default installation paths of many PC games. If you installed games to a different folder — perhaps your Steam folder is on your D: drive — Windhawk will load its DLL into those game processes. You’ll have to go out of your way to exclude that folder to stop it.

This was a major concern for me when I first installed Windhawk, too.

Since I only use a couple mods for Explorer, I ended up simply excluding every process from injection and explicitly including explorer.exe only. This can be done by going to advanced settings, setting the process exclusion list to nothing but an asterisk, and then adding explorer.exe and any other specifically desired processes into the inclusion list.

davydm ・ 12 hours ago

I gave up modding windows in any meaningful way after the several times I was left with a machine which was unstable, or had some other issue, or simply became 100% broken after a windows update was pushed to my machine.

It's a corporate operating system, not a user operating system. If you want to customise your desktop experience and have a stable time of it - this is not your platform, sorry. There is really only one platform for customisation: linux. Because distros and software there have been _designed_ around user choice.

Hacks are cool, but inevitably open up vulnerability pathways, not to mention issues with stability and being able to receive security patches, rolled into windows update. It's fine if it's just a personal pc you can reload at any point, but it's pointless for a machine that you require to keep functioning (eg a work machine, or, my personal machine, which does stuff like organise media on a regular basis).

  • hrmtst93837 ・ 10 hours ago

    Modding Windows often leads to frustrating stability issues, especially after updates. While Linux provides better customization with distros like Arch or Fedora, I've achieved some stability on Windows through setups like WSL2. Still, the inherent restrictions can limit the overall experience. For those prioritizing reliability and customization, exploring Linux is a wise choice.

  • aleph_minus_one ・ 11 hours ago

    > There is really only one platform for customisation: linux. Because distros and software there have been _designed_ around user choice.

    At least older versions of Windows were quite modifiable: not as radical as on GNU/Linux, but there were a lot of possibilities.

    Rather with the arrival of smartphones and rising popularity of macOS (which all were rather about "enjoying" a prescribed user experience), Microsoft did a U-turn and started applying this (anti-(?))pattern to Windows, too.

  • xattt ・ 9 hours ago

    Everyone is at different points in their journey. Let the DIwhy-ers have their moment. I used to want to mod out Windows XP to look like OS X. Then I had a realization that I just wanted OS X and got that as my next machine because I could.

    A huge chunk of the population can’t afford to make that jump, or don’t have the will to learn a new OS.

anthk ・ 10 hours ago

These hacks will just duplicate code by not using builting Explorer/Shell32 libraries and the like. So in the end you are running two instances of different tools. Also they will be totally useless on updates.

Back in the day you could use nLite and the like to replace W98's shell with the Windows 95 one, but keeping the compatibility. On GNU/Linux and BSD, you could use FVWM instead of bloated environments, or Fluxbox, IceWM... and still run things fast.

With current Windows tons of components are interleaved.

jccx70 ・ 4 hours ago

[dead]

jccx70 ・ 10 hours ago

[dead]

albert_e ・ 10 hours ago

I want to pin my most frequently used folders as favorites to the toolbar of File Explorer (just like we have a favorites bar on Edge browser).

Why is this not possible.

  • layer8 ・ 10 hours ago

    I use the Quick access list for that, and have Explorer set to open in it by default. I also take care that the folders all start with different letter, so I can blindly type Win+E Letter Return to open any one of the folders.

    You can also add shortcuts to folders in the taskbar and use Win+Digit to open them.