Hacker News Reader

Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

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)

View on HN

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...

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com