[HN Gopher] Open-Shell: A collection of utilities bringing back ...
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Open-Shell: A collection of utilities bringing back classic
features to Windows
Author : thunderbong
Score : 84 points
Date : 2024-04-24 12:45 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| donatj wrote:
| Bring back Briefcases
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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.
| nailer wrote:
| It would be great to see some latency benchmarks between this and
| the Windows 11 start menu.
| leeoniya wrote:
| 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)
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| 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?
| krylon wrote:
| 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.
| alt227 wrote:
| Most people I know have moved to sublime text from notepad++
|
| https://www.sublimetext.com/
| leeoniya wrote:
| 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.
| cuanim wrote:
| What is your alternative to foobar2k on linux ;-;
| thesuitonym wrote:
| xmms and qmms are Winamp-like players for Linux.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| foobar2k works really well in wine. Alternatively deadbeef is
| quite similar to foobar but without the media library
| functionality.
| autoexec wrote:
| deadbeef looks good!
| mmh0000 wrote:
| foobar2000
|
| I use it daily, runs great through WINE.
| gravescale wrote:
| 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.
| klaussilveira wrote:
| foobar2000!
| inversetelecine wrote:
| "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
| dcuthbertson wrote:
| 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.
| leeoniya wrote:
| 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.
| listenallyall wrote:
| 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.
| kotaKat wrote:
| 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...
| userbinator wrote:
| 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.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| 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?
| im3w1l wrote:
| 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.
| pathartl wrote:
| Is JSON better for data? XML can be pretty powerful when
| used properly.
| im3w1l wrote:
| 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.
| tyfon wrote:
| 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?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| CLiED wrote:
| 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| Why would that cause shell replacements to die, wouldn't they
| just need rewriting in part?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| 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)
| ubercow13 wrote:
| 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).
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| 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.
| Plasmoid wrote:
| 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.
| hosteur wrote:
| How did you do this?
| bitvoid wrote:
| https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/disable-windows-web-
| sear...
| dspillett wrote:
| 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/
| inversetelecine wrote:
| "Everything" is another good option, at least from my basic
| usage of it.
|
| https://www.voidtools.com/faq/#what_is_everything
| newscracker wrote:
| 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/
| autoexec wrote:
| 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>
| eviks wrote:
| 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
| michael-ax wrote:
| 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.'
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| YES!!!
|
| https://github.com/jcs/progman
| Narishma wrote:
| 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.
| michael-ax wrote:
| 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.
| _obviously wrote:
| Windows 12 when
| rkagerer wrote:
| Been a happy user of this since Win 7.
|
| I also have tabs in [File] Explorer thanks to QtTabBar.
| Quarrel wrote:
| FWIW, you get tabs natively now in Win 11.
| wild_pointer wrote:
| 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...
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Always a part of my ninite selection.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| 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
| nicman23 wrote:
| about 2 months i wager
| ubercow13 wrote:
| 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.
| alt227 wrote:
| 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/
| chrsw wrote:
| 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?
| klaussilveira wrote:
| 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.
| alt227 wrote:
| 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.
| pluc wrote:
| That's an oxymoron if I've ever seen one.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| By ignoring it. Running Windows 7 with an Internet connection
| is wild.
| inversetelecine wrote:
| Simplix (Russian language) has a decent update pack that's
| still being refreshed.
|
| https://blog.simplix.info/update7/
| sambazi wrote:
| thinking about the same. what did push you over the edge?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| How does an x86 OS work on an ARM Rasp. Pi?
| autoexec wrote:
| I'd consider windows 7 for an offline gaming PC, but I thought
| later versions of directX wouldn't install on windows 7.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Ah, so you don't play modern games on DX11/DX12 I take?
| michael9423 wrote:
| Open-Shell + O&O ShutUp10 + O&O AppBuster makes Windows 10
| usable.
| inversetelecine wrote:
| O&O team are standup software developers. I like their bluecon
| and disk imaging software and pricing is fair.
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| observationist wrote:
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| The page needs screenshots!
| neuralRiot wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2024-04-24 23:02 UTC)