The beauty and terror of modding Windows • Hacker News Board

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#61

Post by aquariusDue » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 1:35 PM UTC

reddalo wrote: post #33

blindstitch wrote: post #22

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.

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.

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.

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#62

Post by RGamma » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #57

RGamma wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#63

Post by Telaneo » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 2:05 PM UTC

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'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.

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#64

Post by xattt » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 2:10 PM UTC

davydm wrote: post #2

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…

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.

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#65

Post by skrebbel » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC

Someone wrote: post #51

skrebbel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-wat…

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.

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#66

Post by ChoGGi » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC

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?

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#67

Post by noisem4ker » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 2:56 PM UTC

wink wrote: post #58

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.

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

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#68

Post by bakugo » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 3:04 PM UTC

> 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.

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#69

Post by tencentshill » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

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…

It's by the same developer, m417z.

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#70

Post by joe_mamba » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

ChoGGi wrote: post #66

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?

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.