Open-Shell: A collection of utilities bringing back classic features to Windows | Hacker News Reader

Open-Shell: A collection of utilities bringing back classic features to Windows

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90 pointsthunderbong76 comments

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used this extensively before switching to linux/kde/plasma.

also look at

- Notepad3

- XYPlorer

- https://ramensoftware.com/7-taskbar-tweaker

- https://goffconcepts.com/products/filesearchex/

- HeidiSQL

- foobar2000

- KMPlayer

- 7zip

- Process Explorer (and many other Sysinternals utils)

- Autoruns (and many other Nirsoft tools)

"Everything" by voidtools is decent for local searching in my brief time using it. Not FOSS though.

https://www.voidtools.com/faq/#what_is_everything

Decent? "Everything" is as close to a perfect piece of GUI software as I've ever seen - simple, extremely fast, unobtrusive, no ads, just works.

I've used Everything for many years. It would be nice if it were FOSS. Still, it's always been fast and reliable for me.

i preferred things that did not need to maintain an index. searching on an SSD/NVME is fast enough not to have yet another service running in background/eating disk.

In this case what would you suggest?

Whenever I need to live on a Windows system for any length of time, I install [notepad++](https://notepad-plus-plus.org)

Do you prefer Notepad3 over Notepad++, and can you share why if so?

I am an emacs user at heart, but when I was using Windows at work, I did use Notepad++ from time to time, it handled laaaaarge files much more smoothly than emacs.

I actually went in the opposite direction. I replace notepad.exe with AkelPad[0], which perfectly satisfies all of my basic-text-editing needs. If I have to do anything more complex, Neovim is the end-all-be-all.

[0] https://akelpad.sourceforge.net/

i used NP++ for quite a while for coding. it was good. but i always _also_ replaced the built-in shitty windows notepad with Notepad3. there is less UI clutter than NP++, NP3 starts faster and felt like a better default editor. i think NP3 also kept up to date with recent Scintilla releases while NP++ could be on a 6mo old Scintilla version with various already-fixed bugs.

Most people I know have moved to sublime text from notepad++

https://www.sublimetext.com/

Just started using Plasma. It really is very very nice. Quite a few handy-looking KRunner plugins are still on Plasma 5 though, which is a bit sad.

I've been on i3 for a while and have meant to do some rofi tooling but KRunner seems very nice.

What is your alternative to foobar2k on linux ;-;

I use Audacious since it has a nice Qt interface and comes standard with my distro, but yes, the closest thing to foobar2000 in Linux would be DeadBeef.

foobar2k works really well in wine. Alternatively deadbeef is quite similar to foobar but without the media library functionality.

deadbeef looks good!

xmms and qmms are Winamp-like players for Linux.

foobar2000

I use it daily, runs great through WINE.

foobar2000!

I prefer Windhawk, especially with the new Windows 11 Start Menu Styler. You get to choose a better layout while keeping the native start menu. Like CSS for the start menu basically.

https://www.gamingdeputy.com/windows-11-start-menu-styler-de...

I'm currently using it on my home laptop, because Win10 broken search box sometimes hangs and no longer finds anything on my computer. I've been reading somewhere that it's because it tries to search the internet first (sic!) and you can turn it off (the internet search part), but didn't have time to try. For me, the most important is to hit Win, find and launch the app as quickly as possible.

The default search in windows is so broken. I'd type in a filename, if find it, but before I could click on it it would be replaced by stupid web search crap.

I had to go into the registry to turn off websearch.

Windows search has been broken for a _long_ time. Agent Ransack¹ is one of the first things I add to a fresh Windows install. Soon after some unix-a-like ports go on too (usually via cygwin) so I can use find, grep, and friends. For filename based search on NTFS volumes, WizFile² is useful too as it scans the MTF instead of navigating the directory structure bit-by-bit which can be significantly faster no matter how modern your local drives are.

This is the main reason I don't bother even trying Bing – if they can screw up local file search this much, how useful can their global search really be?

[1] https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/

[2] https://antibody-software.com/wizfile/

"Everything" is another good option, at least from my basic usage of it.

https://www.voidtools.com/faq/#what_is_everything

Keypirinha (a launcher) works well with Everything. Both are free. The former hasn’t been updated for a few years, but it still works for launching applications, performing quick calculations, currency conversion, etc.

[1]: https://keypirinha.com/

I might give that a try. When I need to search for a file on windows I've gone back to using using DIR /s <filename>

How did you do this?

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/disable-windows-web-sear...

Then it's still better to use an app launcher where you can launch the 2nd search result with Ctrl+2 instead of correcting the query or moving to the cursor keys

Open-Shell + O&O ShutUp10 + O&O AppBuster makes Windows 10 usable.

O&O team are standup software developers. I like their bluecon and disk imaging software and pricing is fair.

Bring back Briefcases

I recently had occasion to purchase a duplicate computer running Windows 11 --- when I was done setting it up, almost all the data from the original appeared on the new unit after synching up --- when I noticed that the desktop background I was currently using wasn't available on the new one, I then copied it to the desktop --- while I was trying to decide how to transfer it to the new computer, it simply appeared on that desktop.

If you're willing to put it on OneDrive, it's there already.

I’ve using classic shell since W10 came out because i found its start menu unbearable, that way it works more or less like W7, also clover is a great tool that gives you tabs in the windows explorer.

Been a happy user of this since Win 7.

I also have tabs in [File] Explorer thanks to QtTabBar.

FWIW, you get tabs natively now in Win 11.

is there a program-manager work-alike for the unix-desktop?

titled, nestable folders of docs and shortcuts/scripts that i can arrange at will, persisting independent of a file manager. that was a serious productivity boon! sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, i just miss that 'classic windows feature.'

YES!!!

https://github.com/jcs/progman

This looks to be just a window manager with the look of Windows 3.x. I don't think this is what OP was asking for.

nope, that's not for me; I want light-weight manually curated progman-groups where i can mix projects, tasks and collections and get back what docks and the inflexible menu system make so hard to realize. Even even a decent menu system that understood browser bookmark format and tags and .dirinfo files would do.

It would be great to see some latency benchmarks between this and the Windows 11 start menu.

Always a part of my ninite selection.

The page needs screenshots!

I was told by someone that this will all get killed off in W11 "soon" because of a shell rewrite (again) to XML Hosting/Win32 and that "third party shell replacements will die soon" because of it.

https://www.neowin.net/news/new-system32-files-suggest-micro...

Maybe that's MS' intent after all - complete control over the environment.

They're still using XML? Yuck. UWP was a horrible idea, but this new replacement might not be any better either.

Having used XAML in the past, I found it much nicer for the hierarchical nature of UIs than a pure code based approach.

What makes you feel that XML is “yuck” here?

I think a lot of people have an instinctively negative reaction to xml because json is so much nicer for data.

But for documents and document-like things such as user interfaces, I think tag based markup is a good fit. I mean html is doing better than ever, so why not xml? Not having 1gig worth of electrons is nice too.

Is JSON better for data? XML can be pretty powerful when used properly.

Yes. I think the main reason is that json maps so nicely to native types like dict, list, string and double. xml is usually deserialized to a dom object and accessing the right things is a bit more annoying and complicated.

Another thing with xml is that if you give it a finger it tries to take the whole arm and guilt you into using more and more xml technologies like xsd's and dtd's and namespacing and xslt's and before you know it you are neck deep in xml arcana.

Json is also more terse but that's less important.

I would argue that XSDs and namespacing are pretty much a necessity when you're trying to represent structured data. I agree that DTD and especially XSLT can be painful, but they're certainly more optional.

Being able to generate XSD from your code and then just pass that off to someone else while remaining generally language-agnostic is extremely powerful. JSON is cheap and easy, but it's really not that great.

Analyst here and not an active professional programmer outside of analytics.

Is there a way to specify a json schema like you do with xsd?

There are various competing standards for describing JSON schemas. Some use separate JSON files, others put details inside the JSON files themselves. None of them are fully standardised the way JSON or XSD are, though.

I've seen https://json-schema.org/ in use most often, but it's not directly associated with JSON and support depends on how close your software stack seems to be to Javascript frontend web development. It's still an IETF draft at the moment, and development seems to have stopped: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-bhutton-json-sch...

Alternatively, you could theoretically use YAML schemas to validate JSON, as standard JSON is also valid YAML.

The lead years of XML as the hammer to every nail and the subsequent adoption of json as the data format to be used have led many to feel that XML is the data format equivalent of COBOL and just as pretty.

There's nothing wrong with XML or XAML. There's even something to be said for UWP if it hadn't been for the foolish Metro style Microsoft enforced.

Why would that cause shell replacements to die, wouldn't they just need rewriting in part?

The traditional Windows desktop is quite open and has all sorts of extension APIs where 3rd party extensions can hook in. A rewrite might remove the extensibility for the sake of "security and privacy" (read: ad revenue)

Maybe, but the comment by "Malisk" under the linked neowin article seems like a more straightforward technical explanation that doesn't necessarily imply any such intent (I can't say anything about how accurate that comment is).

How long before Microsoft implements some hostile change to discourage or block this? They already did this to other customization apps like Startallback (https://www.startallback.com/) by preventing you from getting windows updates if you have it installed:

https://www.laptopmag.com/software/windows-11-will-block-upd...

Basically Microsoft wants to turn Windows into an ads driven iOS

Open shell has been around for many years with no issue so far.

Also look at the Stardock line of software. They have been offering deep Windows UI customisations for decades.

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

I use Start10 from Stardock on a Windows 10 machine. I do think it works fairly well. I still can't see the complete names of some super long named applications in the start menu. But maybe that was never their goal.

I never heard of Open-Shell before. Or maybe I have but forgot. Is Open-Shell better than what Stardock offers in your opinion?

Yes, In my experience stardock software can sometime get a bit flakey and glitchy over time. Open-shell has been rock solid and reliable IMO

How does that interpretation make sense given the other items on that list of apps? It seems more like the motivation is to prevent Startallback breaking than to discourage its use.

about 2 months i wager

I've recently gave up on newer Windows (10, 11) for my gaming rig and went back to Windows 7. With Open-Shell and simplewall, it is decent, gets out of my way, and allows me to play the games I want. simplewall allows me to block every Microsoft phone-home in there, it's great.

For everything else, I run Windows 98 on a Raspberry. SimCity runs pretty well.

How do you handle the lack of security updates to Windows 7?

Edit: I am aware there are many ways and options. I am asking OP which they use.

Simplix (Russian language) has a decent update pack that's still being refreshed.

https://blog.simplix.info/update7/

By ignoring it. Running Windows 7 with an Internet connection is wild.

That's an oxymoron if I've ever seen one.

I'd consider windows 7 for an offline gaming PC, but I thought later versions of directX wouldn't install on windows 7.

Ah, so you don't play modern games on DX11/DX12 I take?

How does an x86 OS work on an ARM Rasp. Pi?

thinking about the same. what did push you over the edge?

One thing I missed after win2k was the ability to arbitrarily arrange icons in folders (similar to how you can on the desktop). I'd often drag icons into piles (you could basically put them on top of each other) while sorting and then select a pile to drag/drop into another location.

Right Click > View > Uncheck "Align Items to Grid" and you can drag and drop piles of icons to heart's content.

edit to add: Right click an empty space on your Windows desktop.

That only works on your desktop though. You used to be able to do that in any folder. Even if my desktop were clean enough to use as a temp space, there are no scrollbars on the desktop which limits the utility when you've got a huge number of files to sift through and sort out.

Windows 12 when

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