The beauty and terror of modding Windows

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

What's old is new again. https://web.archive.org/web/20151104081734/http://www.xpize....

>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).

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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

Windhawk vertical task bar is a game changer for me.

> 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.

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

Never heard of Windhawk.

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.

> 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.

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).

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.

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

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.