The beauty and terror of modding Windows • Hacker News Board

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#101

Post by eviks » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 5:57 AM UTC

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?

Ok, do tell: how do you customize Linux to get instant folder sizes in your file manager (a mod mentioned in the comments above)?

Where is Autohotkey for Linux?

And let's not forget about all the apps that just don't run. You simply can't customize your OS to the same level of overall comfort, so you start with a better base and tweak away

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#102

Post by Kiboneu » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 8:02 AM UTC

My first introduction to patching a blob by hand, was from replacing the winxp taskbar “start” string with my name. Thankfully my name was shorter than the original string. Eventually I just installed linux.

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#103

Post by applfanboysbgon » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 12:08 PM UTC

xattt wrote: post #64

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.

Or aren't trying to mod their Windows XP to look like OS X. I think your case represents an exceptional outlier among people interested in customising their OS to begin with.

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#104

Post by jamesnorden » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 12:20 PM UTC

It's so dumb that with Windows you need so many software just to undo Microsoft's "innovations" and make it somewhat usable. I finally switched all of my personal Machines over to Linux a few months back, since I felt the gaming situation was finally good enough, and I'm never looking back.

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#105

Post by hulitu » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 3:18 PM UTC

> But many of them aren’t written by the core developer. Do you trust them? Are you equipped to audit their security? Do you want to trust that these mods will behave as advertised and not cause problems?

We shall ask this question for Windows itself, given its past record.

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#106

Post by hulitu » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 3:20 PM UTC

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/

The new PowerToys are almost useless. X mouse is gone, themes are gone.

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#107

Post by hulitu » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 3:24 PM UTC

dismalaf wrote: post #87

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…

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...

> LaTeX is probably annoying as a Word replacement

I really didn't have to care about formatting my master thesis with LaTeX. I had some friends who used Word. They had _a lot_ of "fun".

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#108

Post by alrenai » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 3:31 PM UTC

eviks wrote: post #101

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?

Ok, do tell: how do you customize Linux to get instant folder sizes in your file manager (a mod mentioned in the comments above)? Where is Autohotkey for Linux? And let's not forget about all the apps that just don't run. You simply can't customize your OS to the same level of overall comfort, so you start with a better base and tweak away

You can make the most popular GUI file explorers on Linux like thunar do this automatically, it's just not enabled by default usually.

The concept for something that combines AHKs scripting/automation functionality with the key remapping doesn't really exist on linux, because there isn't any need for it. You achieve the same result by calling the functionality present in a variety of different programs via a script or small program that links everything - this is the (superior) UNIX way.

Key remapping daemons such as keyd exist, as do a wide variety of extensible/scriptable window-managers/desktop-environments. Almost all of these will contain well documented interfaces and IPC methods which allow you to build anything you can imagine in the context of GUI window manipulation/management. If you're lazy, or don't have time to learn the syntax, any recent AI code helper will most likely oneshot your request - my 16 button mouse has various common GUI window management actions assigned to it(that you might expect something like AHK to handle), and only a couple took longer than a few minutes to implement.

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#109

Post by eviks » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 3:42 PM UTC

alrenai wrote: post #108

eviks wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, do tell: how do you customize Linux to get instant folder sizes in your file manager (a mod mentioned in the comments above)? Where is Autohotkey for Linux? And let's not forget about all the apps that just don't run. You simply can't customize your OS to the same level of overall comfort, so you start with a better base and tweak away

You can make the most popular GUI file explorers on Linux like thunar do this automatically, it's just not enabled by default usually. The concept for something that combines AHKs scripting/automation functionality with the key remapping doesn't really exist on linux, because there isn't any need for it. You achieve the same result by calling the functionality present in a variety of different programs via a script o…

> it's just not enabled by default usually.

Because you can't. You just missed the critical word "instantly"

> because there isn't any need for it

No, because you reject the obvious need for it

> via a script or small program that links everything

That's what AHK does

Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows

#110

Post by hereme888 » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

stuffoverflow wrote: post #31

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 nee…

I was recently pointed to your comment. I literally created this yesterday: https://github.com/sm18lr88/win-folder-size

What are the chances.