
Ask HN: Is there still a Windows shell replacement scene? - indigodaddy
About 15 years ago or thereabouts there was a fairly thriving Windows shell replacement scene&#x2F;community... I think I remember Litestep being one of the more popular shells.<p>Is this sort of thing still going on these days?  Is it even possible with W10?
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Jaruzel
I've been playing with writing various shell (explorer.exe as the desktop)
replacements, on and off, over the years.

It's still definitely doable on Windows 10, but a little bit harder. For
example, enumerating open windows is little bit more complex now due to the
nested way Windows reports them. Also, a fair amount of what you'd think would
be part of explorer.exe (as the desktop) now run as their own apps - you have
to disable them as well so as not get conflicts with your replacements.

But in short, any replacement shell written in the XP/7 era will probably not
work that well under Windows 10 due to the under-the-bonnet changes.

For non Windows people:

In the Windows registry there is an attribute that defines the 'shell' that
loads after you login. By default it's explorer.exe. Explorer.exe looks to see
if it's the only copy running, and runs in 'desktop mode' \- creating the
taskbar, putting icons on the desktop, and reacting to system-wide keypresses
and mouse clicks. Because MS called the registry attribute 'shell' this is
what Windows Devs call the 'desktop'. By contrast the command line prompt is
referred to (incorrectly) as the console.

Launching further copies explorer.exe results in only the File Browser part of
it appearing.

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indigodaddy
Nice summary! It looks like the latest shell hotness that some people have had
success with on W10 is bbzero (some sort of derivative of Blackbox for
Windows)...
[https://www.google.com/search?q=bbzero+site:www.reddit.com](https://www.google.com/search?q=bbzero+site:www.reddit.com)

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indigodaddy
Thanks for the comments guys. Not talking about terminal replacements here.
The actual explorer shell. Basically so you have a completely different
desktop. Check out Litestep for more info. Anyway, I’ll do some digging to see
what the scene is like these days. Was just wondering if anyone on HN
remembered the scene or knows if it’s still a thing/active...

~~~
cpach
I remember reading about Litestep back in the day but I never tried it. I
haven’t heard about any such project that is still under active development. I
guess these days people who want that kind of customizability tend to run
Linux or *BSD.

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nabaraz
I have been using ConsoleZ[1] for the last five years or so. It is a fancy
wrapper on cmd with lots of features like tabs and shortcuts. You need to
install cygwin, git, ssh etc and set the environment variables and it works as
similar to Unix shell.

I have since moved to the new Windows Terminal Preview.

1\. [https://github.com/cbucher/console](https://github.com/cbucher/console)

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alltakendamned
Microsoft themselves are making some progress improving / consolidating the
cmd.exe shell and Powershell. it's named Windows Terminal and actively being
developed on
[https://github.com/microsoft/terminal](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal)

~~~
anfilt
I think the term shell is confusing, as here they mean something more akin to
a Linux window manager.

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anfilt
You can see most of them are stalled or discontinued.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for_Windows)

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JDW1023
There's also the Cairo Desktop Environment[0].

[0]: [https://cairoshell.com/](https://cairoshell.com/)

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agent008t
Blackbox is the one I used back in the day; looks like it is still active.

