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.
The beauty and terror of modding Windows
31–40 of 112 posts
Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows
#32I 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…
> 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.
Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows
#33By 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.
Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows
#34Earlier 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…
Did you also have a windows 8 laptop with touch screen?
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.
Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows
#35If you want tweaks that are a little more first party, there's always PowerToys https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/
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.
Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows
#36[dead]
Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows
#37Somewhat 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
Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows
#38Getting 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?
Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows
#39These 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.
Re: The beauty and terror of modding Windows
#40I 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.