It's C++ programs in a Userscript format, which are compiled with a bundled instance of clang. Windhawk shows diffs of version changes, and most programs aren't much longer than a couple dozen lines, so pretty easy to visually verify

To review these third-party mods one needs to understand C++, Windows programming, and fairly obscure theming-related parts of its internals, some of which are undocumented/reverse engineered, and many have poorly understood side effects. This is a pretty specific combination of skills that slowly approaches arcane status, even if might feel otherwise to some. But again, larger apps are indeed harder to review than this.

(this particular mod is 100% innocuous, though)

Top tier malware can be incredibly terse and sophisticated. The trigger line to execute the xz exploit was a `.` in a build script. You are probably fine do to sheer obscurity - nerds who yearn for a Win9X experience are low in number and might only be running it for a laugh in a VM.

What’s really fun is hooking into the WM_PAINT event from the target processes main thread and then drawing your own controls over whatever was rendered…

Overlays, AIMBots, Discord, Flight Sim Software, we all do it…

`LD_PRELOAD` works on UNIX-like systems too.

No one told you to be afraid, install anything you want on your computer. Personally I just dont want to deal with getting my logins and keys stolen. It'd be very annoying.

> If you want to live without the risk of a little danger, go live in prison.

You have a very interesting idea of prison life.

In any case, labeling this a FUD I find to be a rather ill-spirited characterization. "Be cautious, not afraid." It is difficult to exercise caution without being aware of the risks, and this is a real risk.

But since we're getting all philosophical, it also hampers the exploration of the space between uncontrolled safety + original vision <-> controlled safety + a total loss of that vision. Which I find is what a lot of the pleas towards "freedom" actually turn out to be; an obstruction of curiosity and rigor that would otherwise yield a more robust portfolio of options. The Monkey's Paw edition of the idea, where freedom is just another word for the unknown. The ability to do better, and an active choice not to.

If I think about when I usually take on operational risks at work confidently, it comes down to two things: knowing what might go wrong, and having a contingency plan. It is not going YOLO. Note the emphasis on taking on risks (so these are not unavoidable risks).

Contrast this with what was said. You're appealing to the risk both remaining unknown and staying unavoidable, while being fully aware that people do not maintain contingencies for this. How is this any reasonable? Is "rolling the dice on getting their systems infected" vs. "just getting their OS look different" really what you think people are looking to spice up their life with?

This is not a knock on the project or the community mind you, it's a knock on your idea of preferring to keep things yeeing and hawing. Something which I can assure you I'm growing equally if not more tired of than purportedly "having to be afraid". Especially given how I increasingly struggle to suspend my disbelief when people claim they're now being told all the time how they should "be afraid", and how they're now supposedly living in terror because of it, as the innocent victims they are. People blatantly mischaracterizing reasonable concerns as FUD over and over kinda does that to you. I think the trendy word for this is "performative"?

Between having to choose "not telling people about dangers so that those with an inability to properly self-regulate their anxiety don't go toast" and "always leading with the danger and safety information", maybe the way forward instead is having appropriate spaces for these? Cause I'd argue in that case, the extents the post you replied to went is pretty okay for this forum in my view. They know that arbitrary code is submitted, so they're wondering how malware is screened. Big deal.

> Pressing page-down on a text-page or in a text-editor, without animation, it takes me a lot of time and energy to find the place where I left off reading or editing before scrolling.

We used to be able to look at the scroll bar to keep track.

Furthermore page down/up used to move a full page consistently. But today it might as well be a random amount specific to the application or content. Making it impossible to train muscle memory.

Thank you, I was not aware of either of those.

SimpleWindowSwitcher looks like a good alternative, unfortunately on my side I think I would prefer switching between all windows of all apps rather than have two different shortcuts for "switch between windows of the current app" and "switch between apps" (but that's just a personal preference).

ExplorerPatcher looks cool too, though patching explorer is probably a no-no in corporate setups.

I also saw https://github.com/kvakulo/Switcheroo which I was curious to try (although it's not an exact replacement either) but never got to it (also seems quite old).

Thank you.

Actually the registry entry on 24H2 behaves somewhat similarly: alt-tab still switches windows (of all apps) but the UI is just gone (which is a problem for me because knowing how much time I need to press tab in advance leads to faster switching than "press tab, see if the focused window is what I wanted, and press tab again if it's not" which involves a computer-brain round trip every key press).

https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime

You'll probably see around 200ms. Not saying that's the relevant number in this discussion, but that's probably where the number comes from.

I too have had to resort to full page screenshots. Such a complete waste for a tool that was Done.

I've given some good reasons before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45858749

The "solutions" provided to me so far for my primary issue (using Ableton Suite DAW) has not worked. There is no practical solution that allows this software to function in a Linux environment successfully. I can open the app, but that's the extent of it. It's not usable.

> I so badly want to jump ship entirely, but there's several things holding me back. I do music production as a hobby and Ableton Live doesn't play nice with Linux. In fact it seems anything that is resource intensive without native linux support has some issues. I'm also an MS stack developer, so things like Visual Studio Pro aren't available (although I've been using Cursor IDE more and more these days). Lastly I have some games acquired through "the high seas" in which a work-around doesn't exist for compatibility.

> The responses I got were to switch to different software. No, no, and no. I paid a lot of money for Ableton Suite and poured many many hours into learning how to use it; it's the DAW I prefer to use, I don't want to switch.

> Having said this, I did try to dual boot recently with Linux Mint, and once again ran into headaches getting my Logitech mouse buttons to work.

Adobe products, for example. Or any of other of miriad of other products which have only Win/MacOS and no Linux support.

And, no, Wine cannot run anything.

You see, I don't need OS at all, I need applications. Some of these applications are "universal" (FireFox, for example), some has good equivalents, and some are unique to OS.

And, no, DarkTable, or RAW Therappe are not equivalent to Lightroom or Capture One. And no, there is no equivalent to foobar2000 among music players.

Creative Cloud and DAWs. Those are my only reasons and basically the only reasons I ever hear from people. A Linux port of Photoshop would probably put a small dent in Windows' market share at this point.

I agree. You described my main pc. WSL + Ubuntu, VSCode with WSL plugin + Claude code. I can access Linux files and edit them with Windows while running local servers on different ports without dealing with XAMPP, Python for Windows, or similar messy Windows services. If I need to run any Debian software (so rare), I can run a VM if I am too lazy to turn on my other Linux system. All while I can use Windows-specific software on the side. All I am missing is the Gnome desktop, but who cares, I am already used to Windows since the 90s.

Great, glad to help. FYI there are similar settings for iOS and I do same on my phone.

You missed my point, which is that all governments exist to oppress by design, it's literally what governments are, they are businesses that monopolize violence. Some people, esp. people of the Western world are too arrogant to admit it. Personally, I would honestly rather trust someone who is aware of that fact over someone who isn't.

The reason the Windhawk UI is based on VSCodium is mainly for the mod editing functionality. VSCodium with clangd are used for C++ intellisense out of the box.

You might say that many users don't care about mod development and don't need it. I agree, and I have it on my list to create a lite Windhawk version which doesn't depend on VSCodium.

Note that VSCodium is only used for the UI. When Windhawk is running in the background, its memory consumption is a couple of MB.

I 100% agree with this sentiment

I didn't say it was. But having the source means you (and others) can vet the code if that's a concern.

Yeah, I would probably delete this updater if I were to try this: https://github.com/ramensoftware/windhawk/blob/main/src/wind...