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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it's possible to do things like this with Windows or MacOS. I love the idea of cool effects like this (even if the first thing I did after OSX introduced the genie effect was to turn it off—nowadays the hardware is fast enough for it to not be annoying and the split second of the window shrinking away is a nice visual cue as to what's happened especially if one accidentally hides the window via cmd-H).

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Windows Terminal has a neat shader thing that you can use to add things like noise and scanlines to your terminals.

I wish all desktop windows could have shaders applied.

I'm trying to convince myself to write one for a curved CRT look and one for phosphor persistence.

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/main/samples/Pixe...

The Windows Terminal team has a lot more fun than the others, it seems.

> The Windows Terminal team has a lot more fun than the others, it seems.

Instead of having fun, they should be performing doctoral research to improve performance. (https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomm...)

If the person thinks it's that simple, they could offer a patch. I don't think it's simple and I won't.

After that post they did implement a full reference implementation:

https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm/commits/main

And there is movement in getting changes into the terminal itself:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10461

A while back I made a goofy app called Appstagram that applied Instagram-like filters to the windows of your desktop applications (https://github.com/aleffert/appstagram), but Apple continually made it more difficult to inject code into every process (even after having been granted permissions by the user) and I eventually gave up.

macOS has gotten a lot less fun, starting with X. I remember no end of UI-customization utilities for pre-X Macs, some of which were really powerful, like Kaleidoscope. I loved being able to make the system look like an NeXT box (there was even an Irix theme) or design my own UI entirely. Even Apple briefly considered the idea of building theme support right into the OS.

But they didn’t, and the few quirky things that OS X did, like the puff-of-smoke effect, have been quietly removed. I hate how sterile Apple’s products have gotten. Sure, they’re beautiful, but they don’t have the kind of character the old ones did.

I wish something like Kaleidoscope (or Burn My Windows) existed for Macs.

I remember one, "Out of Context Menus" that allowed things like adjusting the vertical and horizontal settings of windows, as well as applying a gaussian blur to them.

You can read more about Eric Trout's extension here:

https://tidbits.com/1999/07/12/the-machack-hack-contest-1999...

On the flip side, I remember in the late 80s that pretty much every Mac disk had a virus on it thanks to fairly loose OS security in those days. I'm guessing that no more talking moose is the price we pay for not having to worry about getting a virus anytime something is put in the computer.

Heh, I remember reading about a few of the infamous ones. Most of them seemed generally harmless; I never got one, although if I’d gotten more software from MUGs and mixtape-style floppies, I might have.

You are definitely correct about loose OS security. It was possible to do a lot of damage with just a HyperCard stack, and those were pretty widely distributed.

Stardock's WindowFX is probably the closest you're going to get. It's old, was never all that stable and never got super popular (compared to WindowBlinds), but it should work.

https://www.stardock.com/products/windowfx/

Went down the comments looking for a Windows version. No luck. :(

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