Hi, Windhawk author here. Nice to see it on Hacker News.
This is just one Windhawk mod, submitted by a community member. There are hundreds others. Windhawk was created to simplify Windows customization and to make it more accessible, both for developers and users. For a more detailed introduction, check out the Windhawk release blog post:
Thanks for making this a safe place to modify Windows in a community-driven fashion. I mentioned it in a comment below, but I use the "Multirow taskbar for Windows 11" mod and it's been a godsend for keeping things more organized as before. I appreciate you and the mod community.
I've come across Windhawk before but the mods being just C++ programs seemed a little suspicious to me, how do you make sure the mods dont include malware?
When you install or run a program, how do you make sure it doesn't include malware? I assume that you check for the author's record/reputation, and perhaps look at the source code if it's available.
It's similar with Windhawk mods. The GitHub and X profiles are verified to be the profiles of the author, so you can decide whether you trust them. The source code is available, so you can inspect it as well. Mods are single-file and usually short, which makes it easier to review than an average program.
Windhawk mods are distributed as source code and WH itself compiles it. It works the same way usescripts work with tampermonkey/violentmonkey on browsers.
If a mod includes malware it'll be very obvious as mods are usually small.
Top tier malware can be incredibly terse and sophisticated. The trigger line to execute the xz exploit was a `.` in a build script. You are probably fine do to sheer obscurity - nerds who yearn for a Win9X experience are low in number and might only be running it for a laugh in a VM.
It's not just for "nerds" if that's what you're implying. I use the "Multirow taskbar for Windows 11" Windhawk mod because I recently upgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 11, which removed the ability to have more than one row on the taskbar.
There's a malware risk in literally every piece of software. Windows itself behaves as malware with all the telemetry it gathers.
The tiny fraction of computer users who have the capability and interest to do this qualifies as nerds in my book. I did not realize this was still a pejorative on a forum where we are mostly all technical experts in some domain or another. It is your computer - go nuts.
Windows is weird. The way these mods work is injecting code into different processes, which is a very common malware technique. Keyloggers in particular work similarly to Windhawk. And that is not a swipe at Windhawk, that is just how Windows has you do this type of thing.
What’s really fun is hooking into the WM_PAINT event from the target processes main thread and then drawing your own controls over whatever was rendered…
Overlays, AIMBots, Discord, Flight Sim Software, we all do it…
Can't speak for this product but disabling a lot of the animations, gradients, shadows & visual effects has made Windows 11 run significantly better on the computers I have it on. They didn't seem to add much value anyways.
I'm a fan of a lot of the user experience improvements being made in Windows over the last decade, such as Terminal, running Linux, Power Toys features, screenshots & recording, Paint finally getting layers, window management & more.
At the same time, I'm still not sure why we needed Windows 11 as the only good updates seem like they could have been done without it. All the visual changes have seemed to cause bugs & performance issues on relatively high powered PCs (64GB+ memory, m2 ssd drives, latest gen mid level GPU & CPU)
It seems the Windows ME, Vista, etc experiment continues to live on.
Disabling animations makes everything better no matter the OS.
When executing a sequence of actions, not having to wait 100-300ms for the device to show some random animation before inputing the next action is a time saver and a removes the "why is my computer/phone wasting my time" feeling.
Human reaction time is around 200ms but in a sequence of actions, we don't need visual feedback to move to the next action; it's just muscle memory and we can reach pretty low delay between inputs if the OS and apps do not impede us.
Back to Windows, I'm quite sad that 24H2 removed support for the legacy app switcher (alt-tab). It was very low latency and operated well in many high-load situations. The new one works okay but is not as snappy and can take a bit of time to show up under load. Plus I prefer the old style (smaller box, no need for eye movement to check its content).
SimpleWindowSwitcher looks like a good alternative, unfortunately on my side I think I would prefer switching between all windows of all apps rather than have two different shortcuts for "switch between windows of the current app" and "switch between apps" (but that's just a personal preference).
ExplorerPatcher looks cool too, though patching explorer is probably a no-no in corporate setups.
I also saw https://github.com/kvakulo/Switcheroo which I was curious to try (although it's not an exact replacement either) but never got to it (also seems quite old).
Not exactly alt-tab but it’s a ui-less immediate switcher (snappy af, zero latency) to switch between windows of the same app with alt-backtick (next to escape), originally a macOS feature: https://neosmart.net/EasySwitch/
Actually the registry entry on 24H2 behaves somewhat similarly: alt-tab still switches windows (of all apps) but the UI is just gone (which is a problem for me because knowing how much time I need to press tab in advance leads to faster switching than "press tab, see if the focused window is what I wanted, and press tab again if it's not" which involves a computer-brain round trip every key press).
Interesting thanks for sharing. I can see how that makes sense for switching apps but imho for switching windows of the same app that benefit is negated since the thumbnail (without intense scrutiny) is generally too similar between windows of the same app.
(As a dev, I often have a dozen browser windows and a dozen or more terminals open, half a dozen IDEs, etc so being able to switch directly between instances if the same app, esp automatically filtering out minimized ones, is much faster than alt-tabbing through then all interleaved, and was my motivation for writing this.)
The Win11 screenshot tool is a travesty. It now takes multiple seconds to initialize, plus additional delay in actually selecting what you want to capture. The previous iteration was instantaneous. I have lost many opportunities to screenshot something from a screen share because of this trash performance.
They probably had to go to 11 (unlike Spinal Tap, Microsoft's 11 isn't awesome) because they added the TPM requirement. If a computer was Windows 10 compatible but not Windows 10 version 24Hblahblah, it would confuse the average user...
Instead they can throw away their perfectly good computer and buy the confusion as a single package! Relax, the climate can take it!
I wish there was a "power user" mode in Windows that you could activate and you'd get the ability to have classic themes (my MS themselves), classic Control Panel, no constant nudging, no weather/Xbox/Solitaire apps, etc...
They tried that during the Chicago development and discarded the idea due to multiple problems with how humans work.
Two different UIs meant that you had to learn them separately, you didn't have a slow ramp from one to the other, one familiar with one could get stuck on the other with no knowledge of how to get back, divided efforts between the two, etc.
Not quite what you are asking for, but closer to Win95 shipping with progman.exe which could allow someone to cosplay Win3.11 while running Win95.
And yet they seem to have lost all that knowledge from Win8 onwards. WinForms, WPF, UWP, WinUI, MAUI... All of these with their own metaphores, design language, and they all feel half-baked, full of bugs.
THe settings siutation is so annoying, there are still so many options locked away inside control panel and the new settings app has a few that dont exist in control panel, its so fragmented.
I find the various privacy and 'feature' disabling scripts/utilities questionable for a similar reason, it's moving outside of the expected behavior of the OS for how applications and future MS updates expect things to work. The core issue seems to be you're working against what MS want and they provide a moving target, functionally it's their system, not yours.
Classic Windows (95-7) was the best era for Windows and always will be the best in terms of GUI. Everything that came after 7 has been a downgrade from 7's GUI.
It's incredible the effort Windows 10/11 users will go to in order to reach a somewhat functional and reliable computing experience via third party modifications, yet Linux is somehow too much effort. Just look at the instructions on that page..
The "solutions" provided to me so far for my primary issue (using Ableton Suite DAW) has not worked. There is no practical solution that allows this software to function in a Linux environment successfully. I can open the app, but that's the extent of it. It's not usable.
> I so badly want to jump ship entirely, but there's several things holding me back. I do music production as a hobby and Ableton Live doesn't play nice with Linux. In fact it seems anything that is resource intensive without native linux support has some issues. I'm also an MS stack developer, so things like Visual Studio Pro aren't available (although I've been using Cursor IDE more and more these days). Lastly I have some games acquired through "the high seas" in which a work-around doesn't exist for compatibility.
> The responses I got were to switch to different software. No, no, and no. I paid a lot of money for Ableton Suite and poured many many hours into learning how to use it; it's the DAW I prefer to use, I don't want to switch.
> Having said this, I did try to dual boot recently with Linux Mint, and once again ran into headaches getting my Logitech mouse buttons to work.
A foolish take, makes me believe you didn't really work in the real world. Because the entire global computer ecosystem is built on Windows-compatible software. Finance, accounting, medical, car diagnostics, and even HVAC software are built windows-compatible-only only.
Don't get me wrong, I use Xubuntu on my crappy old devices, Ubuntu on my secondary mini-pc, and switch between them with KVM while working. I tried to make Linux work for everything but missing industry software made it difficult.
I've tried these things before. Use with caution, and definitely not on a work device. They never fully uninstall and you might be left with incorrect registry keys and other weirdness. May break updates as well.
Yeah, it would be so much better if it was American-made, because as everyone knows there are no corrupt people in the US and every person of Russian descent is a spy for their motherland's government (:
Why such a simple UI utility app needed a VSCodium/Electron UI? The author seems to be well versed in Win32 API, so why not just learn the GUI part as well? It's not that hard.
The reason the Windhawk UI is based on VSCodium is mainly for the mod editing functionality. VSCodium with clangd are used for C++ intellisense out of the box.
You might say that many users don't care about mod development and don't need it. I agree, and I have it on my list to create a lite Windhawk version which doesn't depend on VSCodium.
Note that VSCodium is only used for the UI. When Windhawk is running in the background, its memory consumption is a couple of MB.
as opposed to any other updater on your system...?
> Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
> Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
Hi, Windhawk author here. Nice to see it on Hacker News.
This is just one Windhawk mod, submitted by a community member. There are hundreds others. Windhawk was created to simplify Windows customization and to make it more accessible, both for developers and users. For a more detailed introduction, check out the Windhawk release blog post:
https://ramensoftware.com/windhawk
Thanks for making this a safe place to modify Windows in a community-driven fashion. I mentioned it in a comment below, but I use the "Multirow taskbar for Windows 11" mod and it's been a godsend for keeping things more organized as before. I appreciate you and the mod community.
I've come across Windhawk before but the mods being just C++ programs seemed a little suspicious to me, how do you make sure the mods dont include malware?
When you install or run a program, how do you make sure it doesn't include malware? I assume that you check for the author's record/reputation, and perhaps look at the source code if it's available.
It's similar with Windhawk mods. The GitHub and X profiles are verified to be the profiles of the author, so you can decide whether you trust them. The source code is available, so you can inspect it as well. Mods are single-file and usually short, which makes it easier to review than an average program.
Windhawk mods are distributed as source code and WH itself compiles it. It works the same way usescripts work with tampermonkey/violentmonkey on browsers.
If a mod includes malware it'll be very obvious as mods are usually small.
Top tier malware can be incredibly terse and sophisticated. The trigger line to execute the xz exploit was a `.` in a build script. You are probably fine do to sheer obscurity - nerds who yearn for a Win9X experience are low in number and might only be running it for a laugh in a VM.
It's not just for "nerds" if that's what you're implying. I use the "Multirow taskbar for Windows 11" Windhawk mod because I recently upgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 11, which removed the ability to have more than one row on the taskbar.
There's a malware risk in literally every piece of software. Windows itself behaves as malware with all the telemetry it gathers.
The tiny fraction of computer users who have the capability and interest to do this qualifies as nerds in my book. I did not realize this was still a pejorative on a forum where we are mostly all technical experts in some domain or another. It is your computer - go nuts.
Windows is weird. The way these mods work is injecting code into different processes, which is a very common malware technique. Keyloggers in particular work similarly to Windhawk. And that is not a swipe at Windhawk, that is just how Windows has you do this type of thing.
`LD_PRELOAD` works on UNIX-like systems too.
What’s really fun is hooking into the WM_PAINT event from the target processes main thread and then drawing your own controls over whatever was rendered…
Overlays, AIMBots, Discord, Flight Sim Software, we all do it…
Can't speak for this product but disabling a lot of the animations, gradients, shadows & visual effects has made Windows 11 run significantly better on the computers I have it on. They didn't seem to add much value anyways.
I'm a fan of a lot of the user experience improvements being made in Windows over the last decade, such as Terminal, running Linux, Power Toys features, screenshots & recording, Paint finally getting layers, window management & more.
At the same time, I'm still not sure why we needed Windows 11 as the only good updates seem like they could have been done without it. All the visual changes have seemed to cause bugs & performance issues on relatively high powered PCs (64GB+ memory, m2 ssd drives, latest gen mid level GPU & CPU)
It seems the Windows ME, Vista, etc experiment continues to live on.
Disabling animations makes everything better no matter the OS.
When executing a sequence of actions, not having to wait 100-300ms for the device to show some random animation before inputing the next action is a time saver and a removes the "why is my computer/phone wasting my time" feeling.
Human reaction time is around 200ms but in a sequence of actions, we don't need visual feedback to move to the next action; it's just muscle memory and we can reach pretty low delay between inputs if the OS and apps do not impede us.
Back to Windows, I'm quite sad that 24H2 removed support for the legacy app switcher (alt-tab). It was very low latency and operated well in many high-load situations. The new one works okay but is not as snappy and can take a bit of time to show up under load. Plus I prefer the old style (smaller box, no need for eye movement to check its content).
Have you looked into SimpleWindowSwitcher? https://github.com/sigoden/window-switcher
ExplorerPatcher makes it easy to configure in the settings menu, I'm not aware of any other projects that implement SWS: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
It's very fast and can be configured to set window thumbnail size/area
Thank you, I was not aware of either of those.
SimpleWindowSwitcher looks like a good alternative, unfortunately on my side I think I would prefer switching between all windows of all apps rather than have two different shortcuts for "switch between windows of the current app" and "switch between apps" (but that's just a personal preference).
ExplorerPatcher looks cool too, though patching explorer is probably a no-no in corporate setups.
I also saw https://github.com/kvakulo/Switcheroo which I was curious to try (although it's not an exact replacement either) but never got to it (also seems quite old).
Not exactly alt-tab but it’s a ui-less immediate switcher (snappy af, zero latency) to switch between windows of the same app with alt-backtick (next to escape), originally a macOS feature: https://neosmart.net/EasySwitch/
(Backwards navigation with alt-shift-backtick)
Thank you.
Actually the registry entry on 24H2 behaves somewhat similarly: alt-tab still switches windows (of all apps) but the UI is just gone (which is a problem for me because knowing how much time I need to press tab in advance leads to faster switching than "press tab, see if the focused window is what I wanted, and press tab again if it's not" which involves a computer-brain round trip every key press).
Interesting thanks for sharing. I can see how that makes sense for switching apps but imho for switching windows of the same app that benefit is negated since the thumbnail (without intense scrutiny) is generally too similar between windows of the same app.
(As a dev, I often have a dozen browser windows and a dozen or more terminals open, half a dozen IDEs, etc so being able to switch directly between instances if the same app, esp automatically filtering out minimized ones, is much faster than alt-tabbing through then all interleaved, and was my motivation for writing this.)
The Win11 screenshot tool is a travesty. It now takes multiple seconds to initialize, plus additional delay in actually selecting what you want to capture. The previous iteration was instantaneous. I have lost many opportunities to screenshot something from a screen share because of this trash performance.
They probably had to go to 11 (unlike Spinal Tap, Microsoft's 11 isn't awesome) because they added the TPM requirement. If a computer was Windows 10 compatible but not Windows 10 version 24Hblahblah, it would confuse the average user...
Instead they can throw away their perfectly good computer and buy the confusion as a single package! Relax, the climate can take it!
I wish there was a "power user" mode in Windows that you could activate and you'd get the ability to have classic themes (my MS themselves), classic Control Panel, no constant nudging, no weather/Xbox/Solitaire apps, etc...
They tried that during the Chicago development and discarded the idea due to multiple problems with how humans work.
Two different UIs meant that you had to learn them separately, you didn't have a slow ramp from one to the other, one familiar with one could get stuck on the other with no knowledge of how to get back, divided efforts between the two, etc.
Not quite what you are asking for, but closer to Win95 shipping with progman.exe which could allow someone to cosplay Win3.11 while running Win95.
And yet they seem to have lost all that knowledge from Win8 onwards. WinForms, WPF, UWP, WinUI, MAUI... All of these with their own metaphores, design language, and they all feel half-baked, full of bugs.
THe settings siutation is so annoying, there are still so many options locked away inside control panel and the new settings app has a few that dont exist in control panel, its so fragmented.
Windows' GOD mode CLSID:
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/create-master-control-panel-g...
I used to use Stardock WindowBlinds to do something similar, but it leads to all sorts of weird compatibility issues with various applications.
I wonder if this will have the same issues?
I find the various privacy and 'feature' disabling scripts/utilities questionable for a similar reason, it's moving outside of the expected behavior of the OS for how applications and future MS updates expect things to work. The core issue seems to be you're working against what MS want and they provide a moving target, functionally it's their system, not yours.
Classic Windows (95-7) was the best era for Windows and always will be the best in terms of GUI. Everything that came after 7 has been a downgrade from 7's GUI.
Been playing around with this, it's more consistent than Windows 11's UI itself
Wow, quite a lot of work, but the end result looks amazing!
I also do miss the Windows 7 Aero theme.
It's incredible the effort Windows 10/11 users will go to in order to reach a somewhat functional and reliable computing experience via third party modifications, yet Linux is somehow too much effort. Just look at the instructions on that page..
Every techie knows about Linux by now. Not everyone chooses to use Windows because they're foolish or don't know any better
why do they choose it?
i have a windows workstation because one CNC machine that we use needs it. only other reason i can see is gaming?
I have all 3 major OSs at home and, honestly, Windows 11 is stuff of nightmares to me
I've given some good reasons before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45858749
The "solutions" provided to me so far for my primary issue (using Ableton Suite DAW) has not worked. There is no practical solution that allows this software to function in a Linux environment successfully. I can open the app, but that's the extent of it. It's not usable.
> I so badly want to jump ship entirely, but there's several things holding me back. I do music production as a hobby and Ableton Live doesn't play nice with Linux. In fact it seems anything that is resource intensive without native linux support has some issues. I'm also an MS stack developer, so things like Visual Studio Pro aren't available (although I've been using Cursor IDE more and more these days). Lastly I have some games acquired through "the high seas" in which a work-around doesn't exist for compatibility.
> The responses I got were to switch to different software. No, no, and no. I paid a lot of money for Ableton Suite and poured many many hours into learning how to use it; it's the DAW I prefer to use, I don't want to switch.
> Having said this, I did try to dual boot recently with Linux Mint, and once again ran into headaches getting my Logitech mouse buttons to work.
Some of us still rely on Windows applications that either don’t run on Linux, can’t run under Wine, or don’t have alternatives that meet our needs.
"but he's sweet sometimes"
It's just an abusive relationship and eventually some of them break out of it.
A foolish take, makes me believe you didn't really work in the real world. Because the entire global computer ecosystem is built on Windows-compatible software. Finance, accounting, medical, car diagnostics, and even HVAC software are built windows-compatible-only only.
Don't get me wrong, I use Xubuntu on my crappy old devices, Ubuntu on my secondary mini-pc, and switch between them with KVM while working. I tried to make Linux work for everything but missing industry software made it difficult.
Linux isn’t hard, it’s just different. Better, but different. That’s too much effort for some.
The description of how this works gave my inner ops guy a panic attack. I love this kind of hack.
I've tried these things before. Use with caution, and definitely not on a work device. They never fully uninstall and you might be left with incorrect registry keys and other weirdness. May break updates as well.
This is so neat looking. Is there an equivalent for MacOS?
Not exactly afaik, but I've recently been going to System Settings > Accessibility > Display, and turning on:
https://imgur.com/a/DqfN07kI like the retro and simple vibe compared to the new Liquid Glass controls.
Ah! Thank you! Even on Sequoia this is a massive improvement!
Great, glad to help. FYI there are similar settings for iOS and I do same on my phone.
> The mod injects only in the process Winlogon.exe, and exits once the handle of the memory area is closed. It does not hook any functions.
Yep. Sure. Going to let a Russian utility fuck with winlogon.exe. Excellent idea.
Yeah, it would be so much better if it was American-made, because as everyone knows there are no corrupt people in the US and every person of Russian descent is a spy for their motherland's government (:
That was my first concern too, but it does look like you can build the binary from source:
https://github.com/ramensoftware/windhawk
Why such a simple UI utility app needed a VSCodium/Electron UI? The author seems to be well versed in Win32 API, so why not just learn the GUI part as well? It's not that hard.
The reason the Windhawk UI is based on VSCodium is mainly for the mod editing functionality. VSCodium with clangd are used for C++ intellisense out of the box.
You might say that many users don't care about mod development and don't need it. I agree, and I have it on my list to create a lite Windhawk version which doesn't depend on VSCodium.
Note that VSCodium is only used for the UI. When Windhawk is running in the background, its memory consumption is a couple of MB.
I 100% agree with this sentiment
Doesn't mean it's safe.
I didn't say it was. But having the source means you (and others) can vet the code if that's a concern.
Yeah, I would probably delete this updater if I were to try this: https://github.com/ramensoftware/windhawk/blob/main/src/wind...
as opposed to any other updater on your system...?
> Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
> Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
— https://imgur.com/6wbgy2L (actually a tweet from someone else, but apparently it's private now)
It's actually not completely outside of my threat profile.
Honestly, with the prevailaince of ransomware attacks, unless you're a literal hermit, it shouldn't be out of anyone's threat profile.
And the author is a security/malware researcher. Yeah, you might want to pass.
>fuck with winlogon.exe. Excellent idea.
That's mostly irrelevant because all the thing baddies want to do with your computer, they can do without touching winlogon or even getting admin.
https://xkcd.com/1200/