Cairo Desktop Environment | Hacker News Reader

Cairo Desktop Environment

cairoshell.com

243 pointsRerarom88 comments

It looks rather interesting. I didn't realize Windows 10 was hackable enough to do this. The name made me think of the Cairo graphics drawling library initially.

I was sad when shell replacements stopped being as much of a thing; all the way back to Windows 3 and up to ar least Windows XP there were well designed alternatives to the default Windows shell environment.

A good example of an early one is Norton Shell for Windows:

http://toastytech.com/guis/ndw.html

Then later there were things such as LiteStep, bbZero and even KDE at a time.

Personally, I actually used ReactOS shell as my default shell briefly, judging its workspaces functionality to be worth other trade offs at the time. I believe it still works in Windows to this day, though it may still have bugs that don’t happen on ReactOS itself.

Even though Windows isn’t really “hackable” for a long time people found a way to do many things, especially companies like Stardock, using API hooking and other somewhat brittle tricks, and Microsoft somewhat embraced it. For some good reasons and some bad, modern Windows is a lot more limited in this regard and there’s not much to replace the old hackability.

I was just commenting about the Norton Desktop on here a few days ago. I really liked its scripting environment, brought features to Windows 3.1 that modern windows still doesn't expose as conveniently.

Ran AfterStep and LiteStep for years. Tried the various blackbox things, but minimal UI isn't for me, I want more functionality out of my UI, not less.

Do you know what changed recently? The last one I used with an alternative shell was windows 2k and the shells replaced shell.exe. is that not doable these days?

The old method of changing the default shell still works. Although I don't think you replace/move explorer.exe anymore, but just change registry keys. When used in embedded systems or kiosks, this type of functionality is commonly needed, so it is unlikely to change.

When I talked about things changing, it was more regarding changes that:

- Improve security and stability by disallowing software from invading other address spaces to do patching.

- Prevent modification of the operating system itself, by more thoroughly enforcing signature checking, file integrity, and with periodic large system updates that are effectively like full Windows version upgrades.

These improvements may make Windows more secure and stable for users, but combined with modern PCs that come with Secure Boot enabled by default (and unfortunately, some that came with Secure Boot forcibly enabled during the Windows 8 era,) it makes modifications and customizations more challenging.

There's no clean mechanism for which a piece of software like WindowBlinds can exist, and indeed, sometimes running Stardock software in modern Windows can be troublesome. A while back I hit a bug in WindowFX that effectively bricked your Windows install if you were running with Hyper-V enabled. It was fixed by Stardock but nonetheless, with a living OS like Windows 10, breaks like this can happen more often, without warning, and there's still not good alternatives for lots of customization stuff.

It's interesting because there are actually still lots of ways in which Windows lets software extend the operating system - probably more than any other operating system, but most of them are very old and not very reliable/stable.

here a few more recent ones, but all stalled: https://www.online-tech-tips.com/software-reviews/7-best-win...

Litestep could be really pretty https://www.deviantart.com/search?q=litestep

Yeah there was a bunch of alternative shells for Windows going way back...

I completely forgot until I saw this but I used to use one in the 90s or early 00s. LiteStep I think, and you could install different themes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for...

IIRC I used litestep for a while, and it felt awesome.

The weird themes were something that made sense in a world where Winamp skins where a fertile ground for UI experimentation, and would probably be shunned today.

Still, AFAIR, there wasn't much deep innovation on the UX front, it still boiled down to the same operations as explorer.exe, while this Cairo thing seems to push things a bit more.

I think it’s a reference to the code name of Windows 95, which was supposed to introduce an OO desktop shell. (It did, but less extensively than planned.)

Chicago was the code name for Windows 95. Cairo was a dropped (and ambitious) reworking of NT (at the time).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_codenames

Ah, right. The OO filesystem and whatnot too.

Like others, I clicked on it because I thought it was related to the Linux project.

This looks very cool for an alternative shell for Windows, which is what I am seeing here but in all honesty, as soon I saw the title, it was easy to get this confused with the Cairo drawing library and associating that as a potentially new Linux "Desktop Environment" as the title outlines.

The project is technically very interesting for Windows 10 customisation, but the name is very similar with another established project in the same technical area of graphics, which may cause some confusion.

Perhaps the naming of this project was derived from Microsoft Cairo that was never released. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)

For that matter, it's also easy to get this confused with the Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 shell...

Cairo shell has been around for quite a while though. I remember trying out alpha version on Windows XP many years ago. I'm not sure if the current version is a fork or someone sold the brand but it has been around for a longer time. I also recall it wasn't open source at first, but was later open sourced. It just never gained enough momentum and publicity.

It looks like they took the old blog post updates offline, but they’re available on Wayback machine [0]. The comments on posts back in 07/08 were consistently critical of the project’s slow development speed and use of photoshopped mockups to drum up hype.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20090101024408/http://www.cairos...

This part of the description really hit home:

"Never again waste time hunting for applications in poorly organized menus."

The Windows Start menu is terrible, and it's the most iconic part of MS Windows, or it has been to me since the "Start me up" campaign for W95 (one of the best tech ad campaigns not made by Apple in my opinion). And now it is a place where I struggle to activate (?!) the scrollbar. It's an alphabetized list, but I can't tap a keyboard letter to jump down the list, which kills me a little every time I do it and nothing happens. I use the Start menu primarily for locating items to drag to my Taskbar, so I never have to unwillingly scroll past Candy Crush Slot Machine Simular Redux or You Didn't Install This! Saga.

Hmm. In my experience I like the Windows 10 experience. I set up my commonly used applications in the customizable tiles otherwise just tap the windows key and start typing the app name, the indexer finds it in the first few letters.

but I can't tap a keyboard letter to jump down the list

Works for me: Win key, down arrow to get into list (otherwise it will search everything), typing a letter jumps to that letter. Bonus tip, sometimes useful: Ctrl+arrows resizes start menu.

Candy Crush Slot Machine Simular Redux

That sucks, yes, but right-click + uninstall seems to get rid of it once and for all.

Great advice, I didn't know that way to search the list

This is probably different than what you want but just in case...

I almost always do Ctrl+s to search and type a few letters of the program I want.

That Ctl+arrows key to resize the Start Menu I didn't know about. Thanks!

Figuring out these things is fairly easy: Windows is quite involved when it comes to using keyboard, so usually when I'm in a new environment I try a bunch of typical keyboard strokes to see which ones react.

The Start Menu tips work great, never thought to try arrow keys first. And resizing the menu is brilliant, thanks for this!

Now if I could just stop the games from magically re-appearing in my Start Menu after a Windows Update...

Has anyone actually tried this? I'm curious but if I don't like it and uninstall it I'm afraid of weird glitchy behaviors and a broken shell and I really don't feel like reinstalling Windows right now.

No glitches for me at the moment. You can read the project's issue page on github to check if there are glitches like those. You can disable Cairo starting automatically and go back to default windows desktop shell

Perhaps you could install it with Windows Sandbox. Low risk.

I’ll really put it to the test in Parallels and see how it plays with their integrations.

I completely forgot about Sandbox - fantastic idea!

There are bugs that make it unusable.

I've been using search for everything since Windows 7. Just have to remember the first 3-5 letters, or a word, and I could open any programs and folders/files. The windows key was my desktop, the actual desktop is blank and black.

Windows 10 has a messed up search, it shows useless (for me) stuff first, and never learns to prioritize results based on previous searches/keywords/accessed files. Maybe there's a way to fix that, that would be great.

Have you tried Ueli? Has been working great for me: https://ueli.oliverschwendener.ch/

Looks good, I'll try it, thank you!

Wox and keyperinha are 2 more alternatives (wox with more plugins but less maintained). Both integrate "everything" for filesearch (it's a pity they don't use the 100 times faster WizFile)

I use keypiranha as well. Great tool!

> it's a pity they don't use the 100 times faster WizFile

100 times faster? Everything is instant for me, never had any kind of delay. What things are slow enough with it that something else could be faster?

Indexing. Everything traverses your folders to find everything and make an index from that, WizFile reads this from some hard drive tables directly.

So the first indexing with everything takes maybe 30 minutes or more (I actually have no Idea how long it took exactly..) and wizfile is done in under a minute. With slower drives (e.g. external USB2) the difference should be even more dramatic.

The only downside appart from missing integrations is that it doesn't support full regex.

Ah, okay, that makes sense. Thanks. That means for me everything is the better tool (I sometimes use regex and I never need to index usb drives)

I don’t think that’s true. Everything takes ~20 seconds to index my machine. I think Everything reads NTFS file table directly. Maybe you didn’t give it Admin privileges?

Ooops, I think you are right!

Here is where I mixed up things: WizTree does what WinDirStat does, but here it's really quicker.

JFYI, SwiftSearch has Regex functons and it is (on NTFS of course) as fast as a search tool can be:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/?source=dlp

I use Listary exactly for that. However I do keep the Windows key for programs, it seems to work well enough albeit not as fluid as Windows 7.

Exactly whatI've been trying to look for

I always feel like MS broke the search menu on Win10 on purpose. They begrudgingly get back the start menu but kill most of its advantages and productivity to punish users.

I wonder if the name is inspired by this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)

Probably. Or possibly by Windows Chi-Rho (the same source of the name of the city “Cairo”), which is more popularly known by the English names of those letters, which is often looked at as the peak of Windows UX with later iterations as regressions (though sometimes Windows 7 gets that honor.)

Chi-Rho is not at all the source of the name of the city Cairo.

Cairo was founded by the Fatimid's and called al-Qāhirah, and this is the etymology of the anglicisation.

Wait what? I remember seeing this around 2010 - 2012, eagerly following it because it looked pretty good, and it turning out to bee mostly vaporware at some point. Did not expect this to make a comeback!

Yeah, I also would have said ~2010. After looking it up it traces back to at least 2008. I remember trying out the leaked alpha version, and it was incredibly unstable, and missing all the core features, and Milestone 1 wasn't any better.

Kinda interesting that they still continued with the project for 10 years, despite most of the core productivity features becoming mainstream during the time, and it not offering that much of an upside compared to the standard Windows UI.

Good to see at least two people remember the old Cairo shell :) I remember trying it out on Windows XP long time ago. I'd say it was even before 2010, as the alpha supported Windows XP and Vista.

Like others, I did not know of the Linux Cairo project and was enlightened by all the people telling interesting things about it in the comments to a totally different project.

Reminds me of the good ol' days of Litestep. Before I discovered Linux I customized my windows shell to the max on XP

No relation to the Cairo vector graphics API I assume?

No, none

For the record, you can add custom folders to your toolbar. Since Windows 95 I've found it useful to have Desktop and Downloads there, so you can quickly access stuff. I only use those folders plus one root for projects, so don't really have this problem of getting lost in various folders or regularly needing Explorer.

I used to love this once, when you're a child it feels like hacking, like forcing Windows to have a second start menu (if you make the new toolbar small enough, the folder contents appear as a menu).

Yeah, you have to fiddle a bit to get them to minimum width with the ">>" menu and no extra space. Obvious search is more or less good enough now, but you still can't drag from the start menu.

A long time ago (Windows 98? 2000?), you can add the IE address bar to the taskbar, but it also had auto-complete for directories, so if you wanted to open C:\Projects\Foobar\main.c you could just type a few letters and open that file. It also let you drag and drop the icon (where IE would show you the favicon) to any open program. Sadly this behavior got changed later, so drag & drop no longer works...

Yeah, I think I used this, even justifying a two-row taskbar for a while. There even used to be a Google widget to search from the taskbar (and yet here I am instantly turning off web searches in the start menu out of sheer disgust).

While this looks cool, I learned over time that basic Windows shell works just fine for productivity purposes: https://i.imgur.com/HC4evaK.jpg, and this would just add another layer on top which potentially requires maintenance, troubleshooting or debugging.

The only additional customization I have is a little utility I wrote in C++ that runs in background and provides hotkeys to launch Chrome, Sublime Text, Total Commander and Cmder via Win+1, Win+2, etc hotkeys.

And to run any other program, it is enough to hit Win key and start typing that programs name.

> The only additional customization I have is a little utility I wrote in C++ that runs in background and provides hotkeys to launch Chrome, Sublime Text, Total Commander and Cmder via Win+1, Win+2, etc hotkeys.

Why not just pin those programs to the taskbar?

I prefer to use keyboard instead mouse.

But if you pin them on the taskbar you can launch them with win + x in the order you have pinned them. I’m assuming that’s why the other person asked.

Well TIL, thanks.

I didn't know this was possible, thanks!

shift-win-# opens a new instance/window of an app that is already open, and alt-win-# closes that app (which can be sorta weird with multiple windows of an app open.)

And if the application is already running you can use the hotkey to bring that window into focus.

Autohotkey is pretty cool. Aside from "hotkey" functionality, it also has a scripting language, and a way to make small GUI apps. https://www.autohotkey.com/

Back in 2003 I used Litestep. It was scriptable modular windows shell. It had integration with IMs (Miranda), mail, weather, voice control... Sometimes I feel like technology is evolving backwards.

Cairo is a customizable, intuitive desktop environment for Windows.

Cairo requires Windows 7 or later, including Windows 10, and .NET 4.7.1 or later (already included with Windows 10 1709 and newer)

Looks like it's a alternative windows shell, and not a cross platform Desktop Environment like KDE/GNOME etc.

Instead of replacing windows shell like this I currently use Rainmeter. Very flexible on what you can do. I currently have a shortcut bar, a datetime display, a spotify now playing and controller, a sound spectrum viewer, system stats like processor, ram, hd space etc. Really useful; The best thing is that you download these elements as Skins, and then you can modify their code and assets at will. Really easy to do so. Very little processing power required too.

Wow! This is awesome! I really did think Windows 10 removed most customization capabilities. Glad I thought wrong.

This seems like WindowBlinds [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowBlinds] for 2020. Ah, XP with transparency... memories :)

Oh boy, Windows Blinds were the thing for Windows XP. Longhorn theme for Windows XP? Remember Windows Blackcomb theme? I also remember customizing msgina.dll :)

One could also use the built-in visual style engine by patching uxtheme.dll or by using StyleXP which patched it in RAM

This looks like a big improvement to Windows. It's as though they've borrowed some elements of the desktop Mac/Linux experience (such as Latte dock).

This would have been really useful for me a few years ago, however I've migrated to Linux/KDE (Precisely for a more customisable desktop as this).

I used to use this on a regular basis, unfortunately it still has a lot of bugs (sometimes reproducible, sometimes not) which made me switch to classic windows environment with conemu maximus.

Why didn't they use CDE as abbreviation. It makes so much sense!

Are you punning on Common Desktop Environment?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment

I for one don't miss CDE.

The main reason to use the default shell is that it is pretty much the same desktop as server. So why learn how bad things are if I'm never going to put this on a server?

Wow, I thought this was dead. I don’t remember when I first saw it but it must have been more than a decade ago.

I was amped for it but it never released until now.

I would love to see mininalistic design. There are way too many choices available to me and most of them are of no or minimal use.

Since it has not been mentioned (maybe it's common knowledge): cairo is a (wrong) pronunciation of Greek chi rho (XP).

Does this also replace the file explorer?

This looks pretty neat, but most features listed are sort of customised clones of standard Windows behavior so I'm not sure it's compelling enough to switch (or, the explanation isn't doing justice to what it actually does)? For example:

- The Cairo taskbar preserves desktop area for your wallpaper and applications

I think I've yet to see a taskbar which doesn't do that :)

- The list button shows your open windows in an organized, easy to understand layout.

Alt/win-tab isn't a flat list, but I'm not convinced this is faster or easier. Part of this is learning process though: I know the icons of the applications I use most, making alt-tab fast because in a glance I know where to be.

- Never again waste time hunting for applications in poorly organized menus.

Win key and starting to type is usually faster than clicking, at least for me. As another poster mentioned this doesn't seem to always work as good depdning on the exact Windows build, but I've never really had problems and it works well for me, applications/documents/directories I use often are at the top of the list.

- Cairo lets you organize your apps into categories that make sense to you, using an easy drag-and-drop interface.

This is nice, and looks faster than the alternative (pin folder to taskbar as 'toolbar', populate folder with shortcuts).

- Tired of hunting for the same files over and over again, interrupting your work?

No because of win-key + typing, or pinning to taskbar, or fzf or similar in commandline shells. Though I think this might be something which I can only really figure out by trying.

tldr; maybe the front page, or a link on it, should provide some more detail about the features listed?

47 comments and at least 24 of them are about reading comprehension..

Was Cairo not a Linux Desktop at some point?

There is indeed cairo-dock / glx-dock [1], that can probably be used as a desktop environment too by using a separate window manager like Compiz.

I thought this link was about it. The name clash is very unfortunate here.

[1] http://www.glx-dock.org/

I was looking for the Linux download link.

And, from 1991 - 1996, code-name for an earlier Microsoft Windows operating system concept:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)

Some elements of it were adapted into Windows 95.

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