Windows 11 in Svelte | Hacker News Reader

Windows 11 in Svelte

github.com

365 pointsjaden204 comments

Just want to shout out a couple of things.

One, it's great to see a hack project here that's been done just for the fun of it. I'm noticing a few comments questioning the "why?" around this. To me at least, it's just a really fun thing to do to hack together something, just because. There doesn't always have to be a rhyme or reason for things like this.

Two, it felt like there was a period where sites that would host hack projects with no limitations was slowly dying out. Not just because of costs but also because of the associated risks with it (spam, phishing, etc). I really do love what Vercel is enabling here. When I mentor younger folks, it's becoming really easy to tell them where to go throw up a hack project after they've learnt git and Vercel is fast becoming The choice to send them to. Much kudos and gratitude to the team there.

Vercel and Netlify are fantastic options for those exact class of projects. Render as well for the more full stack hack projects.

I’ve seen some people use Glitch for experimental web projects.

https://glitch.com/

https://replit.com/ is good too

> "why?"

Put it in fullscreen and you can safely leave your computer (document.body.requestFullscreen()). Too bad the background goes black.

Looks great, but not very realistic. The real Win11 start menu doesn't open immediately, it glitches in various ways for 3-4 times before actually working. Realism 7/10

I still can't believe how buggy the start menu has been since Windows 8, released TEN YEARS ago.

The START MENU? TEN YEARS? My friend, how about simple file management? They've been at that for DECADES and still can't get it right?

"Oh, you dragged something over the top of a network drive in Explorer, let me waste the next 3-5 minutes trying to connect to that drive for you". Or how about this: "Oh you plugged in a USB drive that was setup as a live CD? Let me crash for a second and mash your MBR to bits".

How is Windows still mostly garbage at this point?

I disabled OneDrive syncing on Edge, and the next time Windows refused to boot. I had to reinstall the OS from the recovery partition.

Tracking: it’s mandatory!

Somehow it feels like there's more to this story

I also tried to install WSL that day, but that’s just a package with no customization. Seems unlikely.

more likely than browser sync, dont' you think :)

Right. I guess your SSD has zero checksum errors and your RAM passes memtest for a couple of days too.

I've been using Windows for 30 years and haven't encountered either issue you've described.

That kind of attitude leads to user blaming. I have fond memories of the workgroup network scan freezing my computer for extended durations in the xp days

Or just download a large file, choose save as on a drive other than the C drive because it is too big, and watch IE proceed to fill up the temp dir on the C drive, completely ignoring the fact you asked to save on another drive.

Or if you had enough space, still waste minutes copying the deleting the file...

IE? We're in 2023 dude, don't think that is even usable anymore.

A memory of XP was invoked, hence the comment about other XP anecdata.

haha! can totally relate

that 'save to temp-dir first and copy later' behavior is so frustrating because it's inconsistently applied and not easily avoided, yet somewhat incomprehensible to the average user.

> in the xp days

Those days ended in 2007. I don't know if that issue persisted after XP because I've never experienced it.

I've been using Windows since 1998 and I can confirm all the issues described. The last time I enjoyed hanging Explorer was yesterday, and it was exactly because Explorer was trying to open a network link that I didn't ask to open.

To be fair I have that constantly on Linux. Default applications like ark trying to query every connected drive on every use and just hanging there until they get a response even when all you want to do is open a zip file on a local ssd.

I don't use windows daily but was trying to add an additional keyboard layout (US English) to a family member's windows 10 PC today.

Searching for such a simple thing in the control panel was infuriating to say the least. I finally found it, random clicking in every potential places and it was in the most unintuitive place you could think of.

You would expect "keyboard layout" search to bring helpful results but it does not.

just wait till windows randomly decides to add some other layouts and mess with the switching order

WHY DOES IT DO THAT!!!?

It doesn't? I'm multilingual and always had 3 keyboard languages in parallel and never had any of those issues happen in 15+ years and 6 versions of Windows.

Most likely he was hitting alt+space by accident which cycles through them without him realizing.

Hot take: I feel like a lot of Windows issues people raise are actually user errors/accidents, then blaming the OS for it.

Systemic user error is a software defect.

How the user mashing random keys a SW defect? The SW does what you tell it to do.

Random mysterious keybinds that nobody asked for

> Random mysterious keybinds

And who gets to be the judge of which keybinds are "random and mysterious"? Every single OS has it's own different keybinds you need to learn if you want to be eficient with. MacOS has different. KDE has different. Gnome has different. Windows has different. It's not their fault you don't know them or haven't bothered to look into them for the OS you daily drive at home or at work and remain "random and mysterious" to you. Every switch to a new OS involves a certain learning curve for any user.

It's called basic computer literacy in my country and it's also must have knowledge for most white collar jobs as it's part of the curriculum out of high-school.

If you don't have the basic skills to Google "hotkey keyboard layout switch Windows" or something along those lines for your OS, then "you'd better get used to asking people if they want fries with their order", as our instructor used to say, since you're not getting into any tech career if you can't google basic stuff.

> that nobody asked for

As a multilingual person who has to type in 3 languages on daily basis, the keybinds to quickly switch languages are defiantly something I would have asked for and I'm glad they exist.

I know the keybind to switch languages. I'm ok with it. I'm genuinely asking why Windows is adamant that I must have more keyboard language options than the two very specific ones I want.

If enough people are unaware that they're telling the software to do something and are confused by its behavior, then the software needs to better indicate what it's doing and why.

Could be ctrl+shift. It's easy to mistype, and there's no UI feedback. Also used to only change a single window's language (not sure if that's the case anymore, as I use win+space).

I seem to get a link to the right settings place after typing "ke" into the start menu on Windows 10. "keyboard layout" indeed does not work, but "keyboard" or part of it does.

I switched to Linux entirely (but may reinstall windows as a second OS for some games if I get the wild hair...), and while it can still be buggy at times here and there (Arch Linux, so go figure), it's usually my fault, and it can be remedied most of the time.

Still a thousand times better of an experience than Windows.

i threw in the towel as well after debloating the same win10 install for the millionth time.

switched to Arch (EndeavourOS KDE/Plasma) and life is sane again; enjoyable, even!

i do miss Affinity products, tho, which cannot even run in Wine/Proton :(

So what design tools do you use now? Browser based?

i'm not a designer, but use Krita for very basic edit tasks and Inkscape on occasion. can't use GIMP well because it's GTK2 and the UI doesnt work well for pixel-scaled (HiDPI displays), and GTK3-based GIMP 3 dev builds often fail to compile: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gimp-devel

The funny thing is that I encountered the exact same issues OP complains about (network not available = let's stall forever, insert USB drive = let's crash hard) on various mainstream distros. Especially the first one is super common and on various levels and through various protocols.

Me too. Ubuntu 22.04. It's come a long way since I last Linux in... 1999 and 2003! Haha!

Now I'm even considering FreeBSD as I friggin' love that OS. It's rock solid, predictable, and fast. I just need to make sure a few things can be made to work, even if it's via the browser, like Zoom.

I'm curious, what games would you need Windows for?

Between Wine frontends and Steam, I haven't really booted Windows for almost a year now, and I play a healthy balance of modern and ancient games of every production quality.

The only thing I miss is ShareX, which is a screenshot tool that seems to have been designed with me exactly as its sole target audience, because it is incredible, intuitively discoverable and packed with features that Just Work. Yes, Linux also has some screenshot tools, but they are at most 1% of what ShareX is. (And it doesn't work under Wine :(... )

What would the forces be that magically turn garbage into a diamond?

heat and pressure? idk

Time and pressure, isn't it? And they've had plenty of time.

Agreed but if talking about default file managers, its even worse on ubuntu. Nautilus is imo very bad compared to win file manager (hitting a key starts a global search in that folder, it crashes very often etc.). Does anyone know if they plan anything with it?

use dolphin

In the past, the Start menu only listed local apps. Nowadays, the Start menu is a glorified webview that loads arbitrary ads from remote networks and integrates with a half-baked AI. No wonder it's slow and buggy.

Open Shell (formerly Classic Shell) is a godsend that restores some semblance of sanity to the Start menu, but I'm not sure if it's compatible with Windows 11.

Here's the discussion thread on GitHub regarding Windows 11 compatibility:

https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu/discussions/74...

TL;DR - it's mostly working with some outstanding bugs and some users giving workarounds in that thread

If you would have gone through the WinRT evolution since its introduction on Windows 8, you would believe.

The start menu was not released 10 years ago. the start menu was released when windows 11 was released. Yes, it's still called the start menu. No, it is not the same application, nor does it share any code with previous applications.

Now, my new TV has an interface where if press the favorites list button and don't touch anything, it times out and closes. The problem is, if I keep scrolling through the favorite channels, it still closes after this timeout. How long has the Favorite Channels menu been around on TVs - 40 years? I can't believe they still can't get it right.

That my friend, is the logic you are using.

Just like in Linux, you have your choice of a bunch of different start menus made by all kinds of people and companies. Always had - even in the win3.0 days you could replace the shell variable in win.ini with whatever exe you wanted. Heck, you can make windows look like a mac interface if you want.

There are features and choices microsoft makes as a default, and they don't fit yours or my requirements. They do however fit the requirements of an edgy teen who does most his computing on a cell phone, a soccer mom who thinks deleting a webmail email will get rid of the out of space message on her PC, and the priests who only know how to launch a browser for looking up underage gay porn.

Microsoft did not make the start menu for you, they made if for the largest portion of their target market. Because people like you can easily change it, and people like them would have trouble using a computer at all otherwise.

> How long has the Favorite Channels menu been around on TVs - 40 years? I can't believe they still can't get it right

Where this analogy falls apart is that the favourites menu on TVs hasn't always been implemented by the same people, Microsoft is always the one (re)implementing the start menu - they should have figured out how to not screw it up this badly by now

> The start menu was not released 10 years ago. the start menu was released when windows 11 was released. Yes, it's still called the start menu. No, it is not the same application, nor does it share any code with previous applications.

i hope we can agree that if functionality was not a priority while reimplementing, it should not replace a working product.

It was pretty buggy when it came out with the release version of win95 and it didn't even have the ability to automatically search the web for things I wasn't looking for. We're just in a bad start menu decade at the moment.

Surely adding a shortcuts on the desktop obliviates the need to use it. All of my programs add one automatically so it's super easy.

I use https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher to fix start menu and taskbar.

Can't imagine using Windows without it.

Fuck me, this sounds good. What's the downside?

For me, once a day it crashes Explorer.exe which promptly restarts by itself and life carries on without harm. Takes one or two seconds to rebuild the taskbar when it happens and it's fun to watch.

No data is lost. No program closes. It just restarts the taskbar process.

I get this with unmodified W11 in the OOBE on the latest update, so it'd be SNAFU!

It failed once recently after an system update. Blank desktop with no shell. Had to ctrl-shift-esc and manually download latest `ep_setup.exe` and run it to get the desktop back. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230324-00/?p=10... Raymond did not point out which "desktop enhancement software" it was but I suspect this is it.

I like this part:

> We have to hope that enough of the users whose systems are crashing realize that it’s due to the “shell enhancement” program (rather than blaming Windows itself, which is the more likely case)

I would 100% blame Windows (or Microsoft, rather) for making the shell so awful that people have to resort to these tactics.

You can't cripple the steering wheel on a car and then blame people for not finding perfect aftermarket substitutes.

100% this. That these projects exist whatsoever speaks volumes about the grim state of Windows UX.

This part too:

>Unfortunately, these patchers also cause Windows customer satisfaction numbers to plunge every time an update goes out,

I've refused/blocked updates for as long as I remember since long before Explorer patchers were a thing, because updates break my shit and waste my fucking time.

I've had more of my time and nerves wasted by updates breaking my shit than "all the bad guys trying to take advantage of unpatched systems". Saying my system is "insecure" is concentrated snake oil.

Seriously, fuck updates with a rusty spork.

I only run Windows Updates once a year or two when I've set aside a few days to work out all the inevitable borkages, and I damn well like it that way. My computer is a tool and an appliance, not a mentally ill schizophrenic who changes their personality every hour.

The Linux user in me is hearing everything you're saying

and sharing the sentiment

pet vs. cattle

but i'm afraid that your computer is indeed a 'mentally ill schizophrenic' which is here to stay, because fixing it would shift the focus/blame back to the operators.

Ah I miss the youth. Now that my PC holds passwords to all of my accumulated wealth, even a tiny risk of being owned is not something that I’ll live with, if it can be prevented.

I remember a time when microsoft would test their software before deploying it.

He's so damn smug about breaking the user patch of their terrible mess of explorer, too.

nothing

Since I installed PowerToys[0] and activated Run, I barely use the taskbar to start any program. It works like alt+f2 on Ubuntu, which is the experience I find most useful.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

Powertoys feels like one arm of Microsoft to fix windows’ shortcomings due to the other arm via an independent app rather than fixing the actual component because doing so is too fraught with politics and incentives.

So Microsoft does know how to fix the problems with Windows, but simply chooses not to because of internal politics? Because I keep wondering how such a big, well-established company full of smart people can create such a piece of crap as their flagship product.

The impression I got from reading through some of the Windows Terminal[0] issues/release notes, is that

It's understandable that it's much slower and more challenging to make changes to functionality that's become part of Windows core.

If something in PowerToys turns out to be a bad idea, it can be removed. It's much harder to justify that when it's been baked into the OS.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

> If something in PowerToys turns out to be a bad idea, it can be removed. It's much harder to justify that when it's been baked into the OS.

Yet Microsoft seems to have no concerns about changing out functional, fast, easy to use components for worse replacements.

I wasn't speaking to the quality of their decision making. A lot of their new UI fails to satisfy anything but the simplest of use cases but I'm sure it took a very long time and lots of meetings for it to get approved and deployed.

The Frankenstein period of old/new settings UI coexisting is further evidence of how painful ripping out OS functionality can be. I doubt anyone wanted to keep those dialogs around.

Ah, I see your point. Thank you for the clarification :)

If you look at it from their incentives (serving you adds, getting you to use their products over competitor's, etc...) then it makes sense. Uniformity and Usability appears to be a secondary concern.

this[0] might be some insight in how microsoft works, this is from the inventor of powershell

[0]https://twitter.com/jsnover/status/1653541834751180803?s=20

well put!

aand it's doing so for some time now (20y?)

Microsoft's org chart makes this pattern evident: https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/2011.06.27_o...

(that's not the original source for that image, I can't remember where it came from originally)

https://goomics.net/62/

> This project aims to enhance the working environment on Windows.

Thats all I get in the project description.

How can I find out more on what it does without installing it? If Raymon Chen blogs about some "desktop enhancement software", it must be popular, at least among powerusers/devs.

Edit: I'm blind. Only after revisiting, I found "read more" link: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki

Is Microsoft becoming Bethesda? "Don't bother fixing bugs, someone will make a mod that fixes them"

How does it compare to StartAllBack?

Sometimes, a little bit slower is better. =))

Also, ads.

Must be an america thing with the ads. In asia there’s no ads and it’s instant.

yesterday I saw an ad in start menu right between app names asking to pass some unrelated non ms survey. I thought i got malware, but it was “show suggestions occasionally” that I disabled a month ago enabled again.

On the other hand the file explorer doesn't work, so that's like a 10/10 in realism.

Not nearly enough ads, spyware, or telemetry, plus the feature set remained stable for the entire time I was playing with it. Totally unrealistic.

Yes. I also found the interface was way too fast to be believable. Edge started instantly, Windows Store didn't take ages to load, etc.

unacceptable SMH. Could have used at least 50 more "wait" function calls

Exactly my thoughts, too fast to seem real

I'm enjoying how simple some of this actually is.

Here's the full implementation of VS Code for example: https://github.com/yashash-pugalia/win11-svelte/blob/main/sr...

It's just 44 lines of code - it works by opening a window with an iframe that points to https://stackblitz.com/github/yashash-pugalia/win11Svelte?em...

Chromium only I guess. Bah.

Works fine for me in Firefox.

Works for me in LibreWolf, even.

best part is you can nest the website in the vs code preview window

I managed to nest it three times then it stopped working (vs code window was empty). Winder why is there a limit

Here's a link to the live version, if you struggled to find it too:

https://win11-svelte.vercel.app/

I went to https://win11-svelte.vercel.app/, opened up Edge, then went to https://win11-svelte.vercel.app/, opened up Edge, then went to https://win11-svelte.vercel.app/, opened up Edge, ....

Silly but entertaining in a slow morning. : )

you won't believe how many times people have told me that & have become fascinated by this thing alone :)

If at all possible, The links in edge should open in a tab in edge. That'll be awesome to have

noted

Why is a good chunk of the Readme dedicated to pleading for a repo star?

Not the first time seeing a project doing that. This can't be just for vanity reasons. Anyone knows?

Stars boost visibility and is an important number motivating people who work on these for free

Makes your CV look good.

Just went to the project creators LinkedIn and this project is his work Experience section(LinkedIn has separate project section for these) and it explicitly mentions the number of stars.

At least it's better than buying fake stars

https://dagster.io/blog/fake-stars

I'm going to sound old here, but why use Svelte? Why yet another one? Why not an established framework like React or Vue? I realize Svelte is compiled but it's oh so close to the others, and its performance is only better in certain corner cases. I ask because of learning exhaustion with the plethora of lookalike languages and frameworks and the constant, unending learning curve associated with all front end development now. I'm not dissing creation or incremental progress. I just sometimes don't think the constant change for new languages and frameworks that come with only minor syntax changes or small differences under the hood is worth the never-ending mandatory learning thrust on developers.

We actually first created it with https://github.com/blueedgetechno/win11React then I was learning Svelte didn't have any new project ideas so redid it with Svelte and found out its just much better DX. Much easy to maintain + much more :)

Well that's fair. Glad you found worthwhile performance and other improvements. Kudos on managing to learn Svelte and get this cranked out so fast!

Nice! Really interesting to see the difference between the two implementations, comparing the frameworks in something more than the usual toy examples is instructive. FWIW I agree that the Svelte version looks much easier to maintain!

I'm going to sound annoying here, but have you actually used Svelte? The developer experience is night and day with Svelte(kit) and React/Vue. I can have a workable prototype within a couple of hours with Sveltekit, where it would've taken me a couple of days in React/Next.js. Svelte feels like an answer to that unending churn of web frameworks because so much of it is just plain HTML and JS, compared to learning the newest React flavour every fortnight.

Further, I don't think it's fair to say that Svelte isn't established, it's in production on some pretty big sites and has been stable for years now.

Yup, I have used Svelte, but not very much at all. Honestly, it didn't strike me as terribly different in syntax from Vue. It's a similar framework (in this case, compiler). It is a common paradigm in marketing that a new technology/product needs to provide 10x the benefit of its predecessors to convince people to switch. Would you say it provides that for you? I just went and reviewed some of the material on it, and see that it's getting known for being easier. This surprised me. You may have convinced me to go take another look.

I don’t know if I’d be able to say I’m 10x as productive in Svelte as React (I havent used Vue enough to compare), but I’d certainly say there’s at least a 2x benefit, which is enough for me. Projects are easier to organise and thus plan, components are easier to build in an encapsulated way, routing works OOTB 99% of the time, and I don’t have to remember whether I’m allowed to use an effect or think about whether a hook is going to grind my page to a halt.

If you decide to use the tutorial, I highly recommend the new one at learn.svelte.dev over the older one at svelte.dev/tutorial. It includes more material on top of being more up-to-date.

And it has a vim mode if you pass "?vim=true" to the url. Why not a button, I don't know but it's nice to have since Firenvim wasn't playing along with CodeMirror

I think this may also be due to the age of the project. Years ago, I could also create a prototype in a few hours in Vue. But as they get older, these frameworks keep getting more complicated. I'm sure Svelte will become like that too in a couple of years.

Since it's evolving to keep up with the best (at least newest) practices but most of that complexity is shoved into SvelteKit the fullstack framework. But Svelte itself, which is only just a transpiler targeting html+js+css offers guarantees that simple things will remain simple. Then it's up to you to buy in the complexity in order to solve complex problems. I am struggling to build a web app right with Svelte (and using SvelteKit with no SSR - SPA mode, I just want to benefit from the builtin client side routing) but the reason I am struggling is not because of svelte is because there are so many things and corner case to learn/know about : js, ts, docker, bundlers/minifier/build system, deployment, servers, http, cors, UI toolkits, css, tailwind, backend, databases, data modeling/validation/orms, Oauth and probably even more. It' overwhelming.

> The developer experience is night and day with Svelte(kit)

Svelte has a cool DX. Best I have seen. SvelteKit not so much.

Don't worry! No one's forcing you to try a new framework, it's not mandatory. Part of maturing as a developer is working out what you want to spend your time doing or learning and what you're happy ignoring or leaving to others.

Looks like you haven't tried Svelte for something serious. As someone who used React for a long time and started using Svelte for about 6 months now, there's no way I'm going to go back to React, the DX with Svelte has been that good.

If you've tried all of them and prefer Svelte then why wouldn't you use Svelte?

IMO, the profession of software development should be embarrassed something like react has any traction at all.

Surely it's worth trying to do something better than that?

SolidJS is pretty fun, has JSX, global stores, but with better runtime performance than Svelte

You know, if you are looking for a job, that's what I love to see. Curiosity, passion, and just pure software craftsmanship. Fuck CVs, gimme this.

Sure I agree that this is far more accurate of what one can do but you can't expect that from people working, managing their day to day life, family and so on. It's one thing we don't expect in other industries in that way

I understand that! It would be optimal, but life happens. That being said, I still manage to code on the side somehow. But I'm single and don't have kids, so that's probably why. I would be sad to lose that.

Based on the amount of salesmanship happening in the readme, I think its sfe to say the author knows this already :P

It feels so weird when it's actually snappier than the original UI.

It only has to be snappier than Windows, which isn't hard.

Just tried this on Vercel…the funny thing is it’s actually more responsive than real Win11..

I mean, to be fair, it’s doing a lot less…

It's also running on JavaScript and in a browser.

Clearly incomplete, no ads in the start menu!

That would be an hilarious way for the developer to monetize the project, all in the name of realism!

Missing all the constant Edge, Bing and OneDrive pop-ups and ads.

(Speaking of which. Why is MS allowed to do all that stuff when they got record fine in the 90s for less? Eh, better not ask.)

Why is everyone so obsessed with replicating such a terrible UI as windows.

I had to go back to windows this week because the software to run a massive LED curtain we bought for the office window will only run with this 10 yo windows software. And it was horrible. Just horrible.

I quite like replicating UIs I general, it’s satisfying to get it looking the same

There is something with this idea: recreate a desktop environment in the browser. I have done it in the late 90s (obviously in PHP), and until today they show up regularly. Once MacOS, once windows, in svelte, in react, whatever. I thought it/I was brilliant then but nowadays I cannot even grasp the idea on why I did that.

Never seen any in production for anything, and the only remnants like movable panels of properties always feel misplaced on web pages/apps.

Synology's Disk Station Manager recreates a desktop environment.

https://demo.synology.com/en-us/dsm

Synology's web desktop is really slick. Is there an open source web desktop environment that comes close? I've seen os.js etc but that looks a bit dated now. The React ones for Win11 are a bit immature still.

> Is there an open source web desktop environment that comes close?

https://www.linuxserver.io/blog/2021-05-05-meet-webtops-a-li...

(note: one may consider this cheating)

I'd like to think my project daedalOS comes close and is fully functional as far as desktop environments in the browser go. Feel free to check it out.

https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS

Most impressive one I've seen so far. It even works on mobile which is unheard of for most web based desktop environments.

It does work amazingly well. I expected the typical Linux/unix ui for simple stuff, console for configuration kind of setup with my NAS.

Turns out things just work ALL THE TIME. I don't remember even having to tweak stuff. It just works.

QNAP does the same, also works pretty well.

Some (evil) part of me wants to set this up as a live desktop in Wallpaper Engine on a friend’s PC. Looks accurate! Good job

At the bottom of the readme is a huge spammy star this project advertisement with animated images. I cant help but laugh at the irony of a project which replicates the experience of Windows 11 - an OS with integrated self promoting Ads - itself displays spammy self promoting ads. The same github user has this same spam on every repo - no wonder they are a Windows fan, right at home with spam.

I wouldn't have a problem with that, if only they were in better taste... that graphic looks like something out of XKCD, and the scrolling userlist almost gave me a seizure. Looks like it was done by a teenager or someone with more commercial rather than technical background, and this isn't a praising.

This is actually more responsive than the Windows 11 Desktop..

Was able to go three levels of recursion deep until it crapped out. This is awesome!

Have you tried opening https://win11-svelte.vercel.app/ inside the edge browser inside the app? I think the recursion taps out after the second layer.

I have gotten in to go down five layers (at which point I run out of screen space) and it is still perfectly responsive. Actually at this point feels more responsive than the real windows 11.

actually there is a way around just add a ?1 or any thing random after the domain like https://win11-svelte.vercel.app?1

Let's not give Microsoft any more ideas

Already better UX than the original

When open Bing, there should be a bunch of "crappy stuffs" like Ads and Popups. Also, adding a small delay when open any windows to be more realistic.

lmao

Just wondering, is this useful in any way other than a recretional/research project?

Great for the guy's CV

I am so bummed almost no one is hiring to do svelte here in Bulgaria. And if they do, the pay is like half of react pays.

Spending the nights learning is not ideal as that consumes stamina required for the job that pays my bills.

I think Svelte's approach would win over in a few years. As nice as Vue is, getting rid of virtual DOM makes total sense.

I don't know why but this gave me a quick dopamine hit. It's fun to play with and looks nice

Amazing, it's more performant than the real thing.

TBH, that's not amazing. It opens a div with pretty much hard-coded icons and text. Browsers are really good at that. It's rather a bit of a shame that Windows 11 is so sluggish. But that's what you get when you put layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of UI, I guess.

Unrealistic: no spyware!

newrelic js-agent appeared when I clicked on the VSCode icon

Caveat: this is not, in fact, an implementation or enablement of Windows in Svelte!

45kb of js uncompressed for the app, vs 5x that for google tag manager.. wtf is gtm doing that it needs to be 5x the size of a window manager.

If I remember correctly, a common seo pattern is to use GTM to inject scripts for more analytics instrumentation.

But maybe someone else can offer a more detailed answer, it's not my domain.

Funny I don't know how this is supposed to look like because I haven't used Win11. Icons look sort of dithered or something.

> Fun Fact - It has a Lighthouse score of 100

Last time I checked several years ago, `backdrop-filter` is buggy on my laptop. Is it more optimized now?

What browser were you using? Firefox took a while to implement the blur filter for example, but it's supported now.

I'm a windows user. I have windows on 3 computers. The only devices that don't run windows are an ipad and an android phone.

I don't understand why I'd want the windows 11 experience anywhere I wasn't forced to have it. I heard they may soon restore some of the features they took away from the start bar, though.

Hey that’s how Windows 8 went as well. Some dweeb convinces upper management that tablets are the future and the UI should turn be optimized for touch, then the .1 update rolls back some of the changes after MS realizes corporations still do work on normal desktops

I have been using ExplorerPatcher ever since I jumped to 11. It lets me choose my favorite unholy blend of both Windows 10 and Windows 11 task bars.

You’re not forced to have it on the 3 computers you do have it on, so saying you don’t want it elsewhere isn’t an assumption anyone can make. I doubt the developer has you specifically in mind when they developed this, though.

I have windows but not windows 11. I'll be on 10 until they stop supporting it, because of all the unnecessary UI changes in 11.

I love the fact that I can start a new Windows 11 in Svelte in the Code editor recursively. Really cool job!

Similar project for Android that the author contributed to as well: https://github.com/blueedgetechno/androidInReact

Reminds me of a bygone era when I had played around with doing something similar: Windows NT in IE5. It was a very useful learning exercise as I'm sure this one was.

Just by way of comparison for a real world example. As far as I know Chrome OS and Chrome itself is more or less all Lit for the UI.

No it’s not, it uses “Ash” which is native C++ that looks really old school.

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/lkgr/as...

Dev tools is at a minimum

https://chromium.googlesource.com/devtools/devtools-frontend...

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

How to run this project, do we need to install it locally, cant we see it with a web link provided by you??

In the About section on the Github page the following link to a vercel app is provided: win11-svelte.vercel.app

Thanks a lot!

... but why?!

why not

whyyy

why not

I kind of find the excessive usage of emoticons and such distracting.

I find it delightful but I understand why others don’t. Given this is such a common complaint specifically about GitHub/similar source hosts’ READMEs, it feels like low hanging fruit for a probably simple browser extension to hide them.

Stand back! (I do this with ♥, 🩷, 🩵, and 🩶)

🫸🫨🫷

If you have a 🫎 would it rhyme with a 🪿 when there were more than two?

Probably shouldn't be a 🫏 to dang; the code just hasn't been updated to filter out the new naughties.

You can get a delightful spectrum of colour through the filter as well, using the large square emojis:

    ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
    ⬜🟥🟧🟨🟩🟦🟪🟫⬛⬜
    ⬜🟧🟨🟩🟦🟪🟫⬛🟥⬜
    ⬜🟨🟩🟦🟪🟫⬛🟥🟧⬜
    ⬜🟩🟦🟪🟫⬛🟥🟧🟨⬜
    ⬜🟦🟪🟫⬛🟥🟧🟨🟩⬜
    ⬜🟪🟫⬛🟥🟧🟨🟩🟦⬜
    ⬜🟫⬛🟥🟧🟨🟩🟦🟪⬜
    ⬜⬛🟥🟧🟨🟩🟦🟪🟫⬜
    ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜

HN pixel art generator, anyone?

As soon as the HN fun police see this they're going to kill it, though.

sadly :(. they have a hate-on for emoji for some reason.

as does some of HN. time to upgrade from the 80s, folks ;)

I think it's the same reason that excessive bold or ALL CAPS are not enjoyed by most: it's a distraction. Instead of focusing on the content of what is being written. I think icons, just like bold or CAPS, can be used in situations where it adds value (formatting pun intended) - but often times it's poorly used and distracting.

I have no idea what you've typed there. All I see is a heart and three boxes. And it doesn't seem that the boxes are decodable either. Whatever it originally was has probably been irreversibly replaced.

You need to view it with a browser that supports Emojis 15 - https://emojipedia.org/emoji-15.0/ - a modern phone should work

Reply on news.ycombinator.com