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Comment by gordic_sara | Hacker News Reader

heeey, I'm the author of this! can’t believe this made it to Hacker News lol. thank you for posting it!

a bit of context: I’m a product designer, and this was my very first open source project. I made it purely for fun, here’s where it started: https://x.com/saragordic/status/2098916110787916219

screenshots: I added the little video now; you can see many more screenshots on X, a lot of ppl shared their own

trust: totally fair; if you’d rather not run my binary you can build it yourself with the steps in the README.

the “send it to your coding agent” install line: that’s for ppl like me :D

I’ve learned a tooon by open sourcing this; thank you all for the feedback!!

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The pictures of your project gave me such a nostalgia hit for the windows XP days, styling stuff with windowblinds[1].

https://archive.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/xp/wb3adv...

Yeah, it's really sad that modern OSes pretty much decided they don't want users to theme their systems anymore.

Also, Linux desktops had very nice themes back in the gtk2 days. Now not so much anymore (they do have themes, but they all look boring somehow).

A lot of detailed customisation options seemed to fall away after the big interest in customising everything reduced, rather than before. Back in the 00s many of us wanted things to be ours and part of our expression, and themes/skins were an active art form. [thinks wistfully back to the days of WinAmp, Enlightenment, and so forth]

Now many (like myself) who tinkered to make their setup just so now just want things to work but perhaps with a few custom options (wallpaper, overall app chrome colours, a few tweaks to the syntax highlighting & folding in our editors), and most “general public” users care even less, so there isn't the demand to warrant maintaining the extra code needed to allow more complete customisation at the window manager or app level. For those that want that, fun tools like this pop up.

I'm not sure about that. People love to buy phones on their favorite color (and then hide it in a rubber or leather shell), or think MacBook Neo in different color options.

I think people would absolutely customize their ... Windows.

I actually think you missed something important: MS and Apple both essentially cracked down on customization.

There are a couple important carve-outs: 1. The UI is rendered on the GPU now so it’s harder to mess with. 2. A certain amount of customizability is also a security attack surface.

With that out of the way:

MS was already cracking down in the WinXP days. WinXP had a theming engine built in and people made their own themes at first. Within a couple Windows updates they required theme signing, and later the theme engines were removed.

Apple was a little more insidious. Pre-OSX had all sort of interesting opportunities that OSX didn’t bring forward, but even what OSX did have got slowly closed through “api standardization”. System calls getting deprecated one version, disabled or flagged the next. UI paradigms getting thrown out causing applications to be orphaned. Rosetta RIP, etc. On the iOS side customization is functionality impossible as the landscape is openly hostile. Root jailbreak was used for all sorts of fun things as it is the only way to install a modified app or modify the memory of a stock app or add a program that can interact “above” apps and for the people who could do it they went ham even as each window closed and each dev gave up trying to keep up.

I'll grant that the standard shipped themes for most window managers are kind of lifeless, but that's just a function of popularity. Any such project that wants to have mainstream adoption has to...be mainstream, ya know?

Like, gnome/kde/etc can't ship some solarpunk slippy slidy tiling config for the same reason that Word can't save-and-exit with :wq

But the customization is alive and strong!

Compiz-style effects live on in gnome, cinnamon, hyprland...

hyprland in general lets you config just about anything.

WaylandCraft is a thing [0]

I personally use sway as I can just run all my windows without the chrome as windows are meant to be.

[0] https://github.com/EVV1E/waylandcraft

oh, and reddit link below the fold, but look at this thing and tell me customization is dead: https://www.reddit.com/r/hyprland/comments/1tw5x6e/final_ric...

Damn, that last link is killer.

So far I'm avoiding wayland (tried omarchy once, didn't really warm up to it), but maybe I'll try again.

I'd love rain jackets in the spring and autumn, and hawaiian prints in the summer.

In fact I think I will do my own version of this that checks the weather and chooses what to use.

So cool, thank you for the context. And love the window sweaters!

Also, excellent quick reaction posting the video, it was a great addition to have in the README to show it off

Cool project! How did you come up with this idea? :)

Lake Marie is such a funny song. And they was sizzzzling!

How does it work?

https://github.com/FelixKratz/JankyBorders/blob/main/src/bor...

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