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.
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.
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
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).
I recall that the official setting was everything grouped or everything ungrouped. What GP is referring to is probably the ability to break out a single window from a group.
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'.
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...
>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).
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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. ;)
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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
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).
There is a difference between grouping and combining, and 7TT provided many more options.
- 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
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).
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.
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)
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/)
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.
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.
That’s… weirdly agressive. What about me stating I’ve never met a fan of X feels bigoted to you?
A better analogy might be: Do you act with bigotry over people who eat grass for breakfast?
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.
If it's not for some specific games or programs, I don't see a single reason to still use Windows in 2026.
Why is this not possible.
You can also add shortcuts to folders in the taskbar and use Win+Digit to open them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.