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The beauty and terror of modding Windows

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Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#51

Post by Someone »

skrebbel wrote: post #26
mystifyingpoi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, reall…

> 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 ). 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/)

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#52

Post by Anonyneko »

torben-friis wrote: post #3

>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).

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.

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#53

Post by hexage1814 »

fergie wrote: post #38

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?

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.

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#54

Post by user_7832 »

gus_massa wrote: post #37

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…

> 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).

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#55

Post by layer8 »

robmccoll wrote: post #5

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

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

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#57

Post by layer8 »

RGamma wrote: post #27
fifticon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#58

Post by wink »

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.

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#59

Post by layer8 »

albert_e wrote: post #40

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.

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.

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#60

Post by layer8 »

fergie wrote: post #38

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?

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.
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