Is there still a Windows shell replacement scene?

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.

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...

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

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

You can see most of them are stalled or discontinued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for...

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

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

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