Windows 11 is the world's most popular operating system, but with each iteration come a few changes that aren't always to everyone's tastes. In fact, many parts of Windows have been less than perfect for a while now, and because of that, many tools have arisen to help users customize their experience to their liking.
One that I recently discovered is Windhawk, a customization tool that mostly relies on the community of Windows users and developers, offering a very different experience from apps like Start11 or StartAllBack . If you haven't checked it out yet, Windhawk is really worth your time, and here are a few reasons why.
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Windhawk is one of the coolest Windows customization tools I've ever seen
Lightweight and powerful customization
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4 It's a lightweight download
Get only what you need
The first cool thing about Windhawk is that it's a very lightweight app in terms of its size. The app's installer is just 10MB in size, so it won't be eating up space on your drive.
This is because Windhawk isn't a full set of tools by itself, but rather, a platform for different mods. So, instead of installing one big app, you have a small hub, and then you can download just the mods you need or want. This helps keep the overall app size down and makes things more straightforward when it comes to changing just the options you care about.
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3 Free and open-source
You can see everything that's being done to your PC
Many of the best customization apps for Windows come with some big drawbacks, with the most common being the fact that these apps are paid or not very open from a development standpoint. The apps that aren't paid are often very much behind the times in terms of design and features.
Windhawk isn't a victim of this, however. Not only is the app entirely free, its source code is available for anyone to look into. And what's more, every single mod that is created for Windhawk is also submitted with its source code for users to peruse at their will. In fact, you can even easily fork an existing mod and make changes to it to create something unique. It's a fully open ecosystem, and that means the community can keep the platform around for many more years, working around potential issues introduced by Windows updates and adding more capabilities.
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2 An ever-growing ecosystem
Anyone can create mods
Being an open platform for mods means that Windhawk is open to getting new features and capabilities all the time. The app itself is a couple of years old, but there are already dozens upon dozens of mods available, and since anyone can contribute, more are going to keep showing up as time goes on. New mods can tweak behaviors in newer versions of Windows 11 in the future, or they might introduce fixes for certain things that might be broken in an older mod.
Just looking at the list of available mods today, it already seems to have grown quite a bit since I first wrote about Windhawk, and I'm excited to see more and more capabilities show up.
It's also great that you can see how many users a mod has and what ratings it's been given, so you know ahead of time if it's actually worth a shot. Every mod comes with descriptions to help you see what it does, too, so it's easy for anyone to get started customizing their PC.
1 Highly customizable
Change only what you want
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Finally, Windhawk is great because of how flexible it is. By itself, Windhawk is just a platform for mods, and then you can pick and choose from the dozens of mods available to install. You install and enable only the mods you want, so on top of being light, you don't have to deal with any unnecessary changes just to get the tweaks you want for the Start menu, for example.
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What's more, each of the mods is often highly customizable in itself. The Start menu styler, for example, has a lot of different styles available that do things like removing the Recommended section, adding an All apps list directly into the menu, and more. The mods offer a wide range of settings you can change with a user-friendly UI, but some of them even let you manually modify code to change certain aspects. I tried to do this with the Start menu styler and failed, but someone smarter could create the style that suits them best.
And of course, you can also fork an existing mod and create something new all your own to share with the community. The range of options here is very vast, and very exciting.
Windhawk may be the best free tool for customizing Windows
At the end of the day, while there are some great Windows customization tools out there like Start11 or StartAllBack, I'd say everyone should at least give Windhawk a try first, While many of the popular apps are paid, Windhawk is totally free and very transparent about what it's doing, plus it has some great options to boot. You have nothing to lose, and you could just find the perfect mod for you. If you are willing to spend money, though, the apps I mentioned above are also quite good.
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