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Comment by ruthmarx | Hacker News Reader

I've never found an alternative shell on Windows that integrated as well as explorer. That's to be expected I suppose, but it's an annoyance I find it hard to get past. That, and the Windows DE works well enough for me for the stuff I have to do on Windows.

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I am actually quite happy with PowerToy's FancyZones [1]. It's not perfect but it's working nicely 99% of the time; although it does not tile automatically.

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

The newest PowerToy, Workspaces, seems to be a new sideways approach to some of the things auto-tiling is good for. I've not yet tried to learn Workspaces that well to know how well it succeeds at its new job, but it's on my TODO list.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/workspac...

Thanks. This looks useful.

Around the Windows XP / 7 timeframe I used Blackbox for Windows (bb4win)[1] and was very happy with it. I used it for I think 2 or 3 years. I cannot remember if it was with Windows 7 or 10 I stopped (I skipped 8). It was painfree and nice. Now I use Windows so rarely I do not spend any time making it behave nicely.

I have not used it recently and it seems to have morphed into xoblite[2]

[1] https://bb4win.sourceforge.net/ [2] http://www.xoblite.net/docs/

Try OpenShell. Works very well. I use it's start menu.

For sure, it's a must on any Windows after 7. I don't really consider it a separate shell though since it only changes the start menu and task bar, and is basically identical to previous versions of the official versions.

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