6 ms·

Direct Win32 API, weird-shaped windows, and why they mostly disappeared

226 points by birdculture 7mo ago

ahartmetz 7mo ago
> Win32 does not revolve around an update loop you own while (GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0) > 0) { TranslateMessage(&msg); DispatchMessage(&msg); } ...How much more could you own it, really? Is that the LLM talking?
- pharrington 7mo ago
  He means its about a message loop, as opposed to an update loop.
  - ahartmetz 7mo ago
    The main loop of any GUI application is an event loop. You can't do that without using a platform API, and the platform API happens to be GetMessage() / TranslateMessage() / DispatchMessage(). There is nothing Win32 specific that somehow gives you less ownership of the main loop than you would have otherwise. If anything, it gives you more customization than most other platforms / frameworks by having three separate functions between which you can manipulate events. At best, what the article is trying to say is "This is a GUI application, so we need to handle user input and paint request events etc in the main loop. Here is how to set up such a main loop in Win32:" Win32 messages are higher-level than what you get out of select() and such, but that only serves to make it easier to customize things at the appropriate level of abstraction and with sufficient high-level information.
- sumtechguy 7mo ago
  Had one project where for some reason one of the devs wanted to access the messages before it got translated. The reasons are lost to time. You technically could create other types of application that is not CLI or 'windows'. But then you are own your own making the queues or console items. Think they were typically used for device drivers or background service manager tasks. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/subsystem-specify-subsystem?view=msvc-170 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/subsys... Pretty sure it just changes out what the default function that is called before winmain. So you probably could just switch out the first function called (dont remember the cli option for that). Most of the time you just picked the right type at project creation so it would feed correctly into the project solution which would set the right flags on build. But technically you could pick the most basic one and do it all yourself.
  - jasomill 7mo ago
    Presumably you're talking about /SUBSYSTEM:NATIVE, and while you're correct that it changes the default entry point (to NtProcessStartup in this case), it also sets the Subsystem field in the PE optional header to IMAGE_SUBSYSTEM_NATIVE, which causes CreateProcess to fail to start the executable with ERROR_CHILD_NOT_COMPLETE ("The %1 application cannot be run in Win32 mode."). To see this, try press Windows+R and try running C:\Windows\System32\autochk.exe. There are workarounds, but AFAIK there's no officially supported way to launch a native executable. But that doesn't matter unless you want to avoid creating Win32 process structures, loading default Win32 DLLs, etc., as no windows are created and no messages are dispatched by code other than your own unless peculiar startup code is injected into your process at load time. In particular, you have access to untranslated messages by default, and if you don't want translated messages to be posted, just don't call TranslateMessage in your message loop.
    - direwolf20 7mo ago
      Microsoft Windows technologies like COM do create windows and run message loops on your behalf. When you drag on a title bar it runs a modal message loop in kernel mode. Took me a while to figure that one out...
- Dwedit 7mo ago
  "GetMessage" can do a lot of things you don't expect it to do. Ever used a global keyboard hook? Your keyboard handler code is called because "GetMessage" is calling other functions to have it get handled.
tdeck 7mo ago
> The point was usually not usability. It was identity. Is it bad that when I read that I immediately thought "this was written by an LLM."
- mauriciolange 7mo ago
  Absolutely, same feeling here. But I also see that the author wanted to say something, and finally he manages: it begins as a rant (generated by a prompt of course) the goes to some examples that are entertaining, at least making me remember how I did some things in the past.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- Karuma 7mo ago
  Every single line in this article was written by an LLM...
mauriciolange 7mo ago
Some AI slop aside, nice article to help us remember that the platform is much more powerful if we dare to do some things without the crippling framework help.
Sharlin 7mo ago
Yeah, weird-shaped windows are definitely not something that should make a comeback. Just because you could doesn't mean you should. > Today, all Windows desktop apps look the same as they are the same; they are all built on crap React, Electron, electronbun, and Tauri browser wrappers that mimic the real Desktop apps. Desktop apps should look the same because they should use the OS GUI framework; that has nothing to do with React and Electron. I can't quite understand this argument; being webview based enables applications to look different from each other, like websites do, not similar. If they still do look similar, that's a good thing. > The point was usually not usability. It was identity. Yeah. And usability is sort of a big deal. Applications that implement their own widgets or color schemes or nonstandard shapes usually pay zero attention to usability or accessibility. They almost invariably lack all standard affordances and disregard the standard UX guidelines. Also, ironically the applications with the most "identity" today tend to be control panels and other accessories by HW manufacturers bundled with device drivers, and they also happen to be the crappiest, most terrible bloatware that an average user is likely to encounter.
- hnthrowaway0315 7mo ago
  I don't know. They look cool. If someone wants to bring them back it's a viable option. I'd definitely welcome it.
- jordand 7mo ago
  Accessibility is really important as well, as there's different laws and regulations covering people's rights here too. Modern cross-platform GUI frameworks (as heavy as they can be) have no issues supporting screen readers and HiDPI for people with sight difficulties.
- reddalo 7mo ago
  > that has nothing to do with React and Electron Not only that, but I think that Electron leads to the opposite problem: all apps look and behave differently, they don't follow platform guidelines, they look out of place.
  - shooly 7mo ago
7bit 7mo ago
This starts out as a rant, wouldn't know how it ends. It's good weird-shaped windows disappeared. They are a usability nightmare and override what theme that the users wants for himself.
- silon42 7mo ago
  Have they? I see stupid corner radius way too often.
creshal 7mo ago
> The point was usually not usability. It was identity. And we're not even getting usability out of it! Each of those bland react-angles is subtly inconsistent with the OS, with each other, and very often, itself. And in 6 months everything will move around again, for no reason other than to keep the responsible managers employed, without improving UX. And a11y is crying in a corner somewhere, forgotten.
hackrmn 7mo ago
First, taking the opportunity this discussion presents, I'd like to state for the record, AGAIN, that I have long appreciated the Win32 API and still do -- not because it's great in and out of itself necessarily, it certainly has more warts than your average toad native to the Amazon, but because it de-facto worked for a long while through simple iteration (which grew warts too though) _and_ while it didn't demand Microsoft had everything for _everyone_, it kept Win32 development stable "at the bottom", as the "assembly" layer of Windows development, which everything else was free to build on, _in peace_. Ironically -- looking at the volume of APIs and SDKs Microsoft is churning out today, by comparison, through sheer mass and velocity -- they've proven utterly unable to be sole guardians of their own operating system. There's a plethora of articles shared on Hacker News on this inadequacy on their part to converge on some subset of software that a Windows developer can use to just start with a window or two of their own, on the screen. Win32 _gave you exactly that_. And even `CreateWindow2` export would have worked beyond what `CreateWindow` or `CreateWindowEx` couldn't provide, because you could count on someone who loved it more to just abstract it with a _thin_ layer like WxWidgets etc. Things _worked_. Now there's internal strife between the .NET and "C++ or bust" teams at Microsoft, and the downstream developers are just everything between confused and irritated, this is entirely self-inflicted, Microsoft. It's also a sign of bloat -- if the company could split these groups into subsidiaries, they could compete on actual value delivered, but under the Microsoft umbrella, the result is entirely different. Second -- and this is a different point entirely -- not two weeks ago there was at least _two_ articles shared here which I read with a mix of mild amusement and sober agreement, about the _opposite_ of what the author of the article linked above, advocates for -- _idiomatic_ design (usually one that's internally consistent): * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738827 ("Bring back Idiomatic Design") * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47547009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47547009 ("Make macOS consistently bad unironically") What I am getting at is that this is clearly different people vocally preferring different -- _opposite_ -- UX experiences. From my brief stint with graphic design, I know there's no silver bullet there either -- consistency is on some level in a locked-horns conflict with creativity (which in part suggests _defiance_), but it's just funny that we now have examples of both, with the above, to which I should add: > This is why we can't have nice things! Also, while we "peasants" argue about which way good design should lean -- someone likes their WinAmp-like alpha-blended non-uniform windows and someone else maintains anything that's not defined by the OS is sheer heresy -- the market for one or the other is kept well fueled and another round on the carousel we all go (money happily changing hands). For my part I wish we'd settle, as much as settling can be done. The APIs should support both, but the user should get to decide, not the developer. Which is incidentally what CSS was _ideally_ kind of was supposed to give us, but we're not really there with that, and I am digressing.
NooneAtAll3 7mo ago
is it possible to do this in linux?
- tdeck 7mo ago
  Sure, in X11 https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xextproto/shape.html https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xextproto/shape.html And for Wayland I found this https://dev.tizen.narkive.com/AkKHZRHh/wayland-non-rectangular-wayland-window-input-through https://dev.tizen.narkive.com/AkKHZRHh/wayland-non-rectangul...
- bawolff 7mo ago
  xeyes must work somehow.
  - 1718627440 7mo ago
    Yeah X11 even allows for holes in windows.
- shatsky 7mo ago
  SDL3 can handle both Wayland and X11: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47790895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47790895
itmitica 7mo ago
Talking about choice. The article is presented in non-avoidable dark mode. Enough already! Say it with me: dark mode does not directly reduces the brightness, which should be your main concern, it only masks the brightness, which is BAD!
- IIsi50MHz 7mo ago
  Colour me confused. Dark mode on an oled reduces brightness (and power consumption). Dark mode on my work laptop (not oled) reduces backlight brightness. This is auto-tragical, because it seems to only respond to changes in the display buffer's average requested luminance, instead of using an ambient light sensor. Dropping backlight toward minimum when the room is bright makes the screen mostly unreadable. And there's no control for this. Dell should be ashamed! More importantly, if you place any darkening filter, including a darkened set of pixels, in front of a light source, it reduces the brightness. But perhaps the main concern you intended is "power consumption", not "emitted lux"? If, I'd say "Depends on your application.".
  - itmitica 7mo ago
    Dark modes alone only reduce lightness, are not reducing brightness. That's the distinction some are missing. And the most important parts: - no dark mode is actually needed, for me anyway, once I reduce brightness; - I have serious retina artifacts issues after reading a dark mode web page like that one.
donatj 7mo ago
I am reminded of how the CD burning app Disco for Mac would actually smoke while your disc was burning. Standard looking Window but with semitransparent smoke billowing out the top. If I recall, Steve Jobs showed it off on stage and loved it.
okanat 7mo ago
> freaking memory is 77% full when freaking Windows 11 starts up. Unused memory is wasted memory. 77% is basically caches + private process memory + shared memory. Unless you are comparing by the private committed working set, you usually have no idea of the actual usage. .Net apps and browsers often allocate overcommitted memory to avoid making system calls. I get it, using browsers for ToDo apps is slow, however measuring their impact is harder than you think. At the same time the best x-platform UI framework is the browser. Qt comes next but it lacks man-decade amount of fixes/polishing to match native font support and text rendering, media handling, accessibility support, hw acceleration and memory pressure behaviors of Skia and Chromium.
- iggldiggl 7mo ago
  > Unused memory is wasted memory. 77% is basically caches + private process memory + shared memory. In simplified overviews, Windows counts file system caches (standby memory) as free (respectively available) memory, so if 77% of 32 GB is to be taken literally, it still sounds rather on the high side.
- pidgeon_lover 7mo ago
  > Unused memory is wasted memory. Why does my computer freeze and become unusable when the RAM is 90%, then? That myth is complete nonsense - RAM is like a seatbelt or a crumple zone, serves as a buffer between the user and crashes, and will hopefully never be tested under use.
gyomu 7mo ago
I think those observations get to the crux of the issue: > That is why weird shaped windows are easy to prototype and expensive to polish. > But there is an issue with Win32 API programming. And the truth is that custom windows mean doing everything yourself, controlling every Windows message, and that is fragile Software used to be made by small teams (often of 1). Once released it could be expected to be stable for years. The priorities have shifted to software that can be built and iterated on quickly, by large teams with high turnover. It’s not uncommon for popular software to get updated weekly, daily. I suspect this is also why skeuomorphic design lost the evolutionary race - everything needs to be tweaked and aligned and optimized ad hoc. If you want to reorganize the interface, it means potentially recreating a lot of assets. Flat design is interchangeable and modular. These trends will only get stronger with agentic software engineering - the incentives reward scale and speed. This is also why we don’t really see large ornate hand carved wooden funiture anymore, it’s all flatpack particleboard now.
- iamcalledrob 7mo ago
  > But there is an issue with Win32 API programming. And the truth is that custom windows mean doing everything yourself, controlling every Windows message, and that is fragile This isn't actually true though. You can delegate to the default window proc, and only customise what you want. Sure, if your window is now a triangle, you need to think about how resizing is going to work. But you don't need to re-implement everything from scratch -- only the defaults that aren't compatible with your new design.
  - sumtechguy 7mo ago
    > This isn't actually true though. You can delegate to the default window proc, and only customise what you want. Yeah that was my memory of doing this stuff. You basically just added what you wanted to the case statement (or other hooks depending on your framework). Then dump the rest onto the default proc. The default 'wizards' usually made the standard petzold structure for you and you didnt even really have to think much about it. Now if you were doing everything by yourself just make sure you read the docs and make sure you call the default in the right cases.
iamcalledrob 7mo ago
Personally, I find that any Windows application that is remotely polished will have its own win32 WindowProc anyway, even if written in higher-level tech. For example, if you want custom window controls, you need to use a WindowProc + WM_NCHITTEST to tell windows where the buttons are, so the OS can do things like display the window snapping controls when you hover over the "Maximize" button. Sidenote: as a designer, its disappointing how many Windows apps are subtly broken in a bunch of these ways. Its not that hard. "Modern" UI frameworks generally don't do this work for you either, there's a real lack of attention to detail.
patwolf 7mo ago
It reminds me a bit of one of the reasons Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes didn't catch on. It's difficult to make rectangular furniture work efficiently in a non-rectangular space. Likewise, it's difficult to efficiently use a non-rectangular window on a rectangular monitor.
- oorza 7mo ago
  They're becoming more popular in Florida, as a poured concrete geodesic dome is basically immune to a hurricane.
tariky 7mo ago
This article brings some flashback from Winamp skinning days. Anyone else liked to skin they Winamp?
- solstice 7mo ago
  Oh yeah. Browsing the submissions and forums on customize.org are among my first forays into the internet.
- jayd16 7mo ago
  How else would you whip the llama's ass?
  - Dwedit 7mo ago
    You summon Wesley Willis of course (rip).
mark-r 7mo ago
I worked on Windows apps for many years. The problem is that the Win32 interface only really gets you 90% control. The hardest thing I've ever done was when our product manager decided that color theming our app was an essential new feature. That's when you find out that certain Windows features like scroll bars under certain conditions bypass the usual message loop completely, because they know they can get away with it. The part I remember most vividly was recreating the lowly MessageBox from scratch, because none of the internals of the system supplied one were exposed in a way that you could modify them.
- hnthrowaway0315 7mo ago
  Wow this could be painful, to try to recreate something from scratch. Would QT make it work?
  - sumtechguy 7mo ago
    It was more of you had to know where to grab control. It was not always clear. With some of them it was dead easy and you can do it on window creation. Others you had to hook it out by playing with the window params (SetWindowLong) and getting the underlying control and then changing it. Some controls had their own bespoke way where you would send messages to the control then it would take care of it. Some you would have to iterate over the control list that window controlled and change it. In some cases it was just such a pain you were better off making your own custom control window that was just a mashup of other controls that you could control. It was one part experimentation and one part reading the docs (if the control had it). Now if it was a built in windows control you were playing with. You had to take on the risk on windows version update the customization you did would break if you did non documented things.
    - mark-r 7mo ago
      The biggest problem was when there was an established protocol, but it wasn't always followed. I remember scroll bars being the worst. Usually you could respond to the messages and everything would work the way you want, but there were some edge cases where Windows would update those scroll bars without even telling you it was doing so. And of course it would paint those updates in the default colors.
ZoomZoomZoom 7mo ago
I'm all for Win32, but those odd-shapes and custom skins were the precursors and the normalizing precedent for the current default mentality of "visual identity = branding" that's been killing desktop computing experience for years and is one of the reasons we have to endure reacts, electrons and multitude of half-baked widget libraries that consist of things looking like no particular control but all feature blurry text rendering, flaky accessibility, negative information density and their own special sets of bugs. Unless you're building a Blender or an Ardour or, I don't know, a trading platform or a game, an individualized GUI should be the last of your priorities.
- hnthrowaway0315 7mo ago
  It's different. Electron apps all look the same without actually making much efforts to make them "personal" -- they just want to release an app ASAP so they chose Electron. On the other hand, the Win32 era "skins" like they ones used in Video Player and Winamp are very personal -- they have distinct styles. Maybe we don't like the styles, but at least they are trying to make a unique taste. Electron apps do not have tastes. Unless you count flat design + as little UI as possible as a taste. Modern operating systems are for servers, for corporations. They are not personal. Linux was for hackers and sysadmins then, not power users, and for servers now. Linux does make a come back for desktop because Windows team makes such a herculean effort to trash its own product. The Win 3.1 - Win XP era are the real "personal" era.
  - bri3d 7mo ago
    > Electron apps all look the same without actually making much efforts to make them "personal" -- they just want to release an app ASAP so they chose Electron. Which is the most goofy thing about the whole situation! I would argue that the push for “visual identity” was largely responsible for the drive towards web apps vs. native apps in the early 00s. In exchange we got all of these tortured UI frameworks built to paper over hypertext abstractions that weren’t well suited to application development to start with. And now we use these frameworks to make bland applications again!
    - 7mo ago
torgoguys 7mo ago
>A freaking notepad app takes almost 50mb in memory when equivalent NOTEPAD done in pure Win32 C takes [only] 1.8mb of memory. Kids these days! A full 1.8MB of memory for little more than a wrapper around an existing win32 multi-line text box control! (Note that I added the "[only]" in the quote above to make it clear what the author meant since the quote was ripped from context).
- hnthrowaway0315 7mo ago
  I wonder what is the memory foot print of the notepad application in NT 3.1/3.5? The OS is supposed to run on 16MB systems so 1.8MB is definitely a LOT.
- NetMageSCW 7mo ago
  Having written a full notepad clone (.LOG works) for Windows CE using MFC, it is a little bit more than that.
phendrenad2 7mo ago
Weird window shapes were really great when you were seated at a desktop computer. Not so great on laptops. Not viable on tablets or phones.
ihuk 7mo ago
I believe I went to high school with the author, so this took me down memory lane. I wrote an FTP client back in 1999 using only the Win32 API and C. Good times.
51Cards 7mo ago
I used to write a lot of native Windows corporate software in the 90's and 2000's and my standard login window was a floating draggable oval. Nothing else was oddly shaped but I did get a lot of comments on the oval login windows. It was a bit about being unique, marking my "style", and just because I could. I will add though in the 90's it did make me nuts when entire applications were wildly shaped and you had to figure out how to use them. Editing this to add: I really miss that level of coding and working with Win32. I get that the world has moved on and HTML or some runtime flavour of it has taken over but I too lament the los of true control I once had. I hate that my stack can be broken because some runtime was updated out of my control or the crazy load times of simple projects. I know many today would say it was messy and problematic (and it could be) but it's definitely a lost art form.
- cachius 7mo ago
  Also the 3 pane GIMP experience.
  - panzi 7mo ago
    I think that's just how early Mac Photoshop worked. So they copied that and didn't update it for decades.
Aardwolf 7mo ago
> A freaking notepad app takes almost 50mb in memory when equivalent NOTEPAD done in pure Win32 C takes 1.8mb of memory. 1.8MB? I don't know how much it took on our 386 computer with 4MB RAM and windows 3.11, but hopefully not that much
- jasomill 7mo ago
  Given that I assume NOTEPAD.EXE is still basically a window containing an optional status bar and a multiline edit control with a custom WNDPROC for managing features like word wrap, I'm actually curious why it opens with such a large private working set, even on Windows 11. Possibly space for data allocated by one of the 50+ DLLs it loads directly or indirectly to support features like Unicode text input and rendering. Actually, it gets much worse. By default, recent Windows 11 versions use a completely new version of Notepad with support for things like tabs, styled text, and AI (!). Even with all the new features disabled, this one has a 32 MB private working set before opening a single file. Amusingly, GNU Emacs, a.k.a. Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping at a time when entry-level UNIX workstations actually shipped with as little as 4 MB RAM, opens on the same machine with a smaller (25 MB) private working set than the new Notepad. To be fair to at least one team at Microsoft, the EDIT.EXE text-mode editor recently added to Windows 11, with a user interface that somehow manages to be more consistent with basic Windows UI conventions than many modern Windows GUI apps despite not being a GUI app at all, opens with a private working set size of only 520 kB.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
- Dwedit 7mo ago
  Even a minimal Hello World program (1.5KB executable) takes 340K of active private working set, and 552K of commit size. Windows just don't allow programs to use any less memory than that. You're bound by what the system libraries allocate (either statically or dynamically). Once you create a window, even if you haven't drawn that window, your minimum is now around 500KB.
mercwear 7mo ago
This reminds me of the mid to late 90's warez scene, all of the key crackers had neat interfaces like this.
PaulHoule 7mo ago
I remember in the late 1990s Windows applications, particularly the little weird ones like the app you would use to work a (flatbed) scanner, often tried hard to have unique themed appearances. The industry seemed to lose interest by 2005 or so. I got a job as a Silverlight programmer not long after that which got me to learn WPF and WPF had facilities for theming that seemed capable and well thought out (would be easy, for instance, to turn pill buttons diagonal) but these hardly ever got used, I think the industry had moved on. Lately I have had to run Office '98 which tries to take over your desktop with Clippy and other things and it still tries to do it to Windows 11. The borderless windows from Office '98 don't quite look right now but it all works.
rbanffy 7mo ago
> Desktop UI culture shifted from “look at this crazy skin” to “work reliably and get out of my way.” I miss the wobbly windows I had in Linux when we started playing with Compiz. Or neko on my Sun machines. As for weird-shaped windows, I think it is about ergonomics. A different shape requires more thinking to operate. Form should follow function, not the other way around - if the odd shape serves a purpose, then it makes sense. If it's just to show off, or to make the app look different, then it becomes a usability issue.
- jasomill 7mo ago
  I don't, though I still have fond memories of olwm, AfterStep, and WindowMaker, as well as the NEXTSTEP 3.3 GUI running on greyscale NeXT hardware fished out of a dumpster behind the Indiana University School of Journalism in the late '90s following a hot tip from a friend who worked for university IT (as well as NeXT tech support who graciously sent me a full OS media kit free of charge so I could actually use it).
  - rbanffy 7mo ago
    Olwm was gorgeous. Elegant and stays out of the way.
- seritools 7mo ago
  > I miss the wobbly windows I had in Linux when we started playing with Compiz. KDE still has them: Settings -> Window Management -> Desktop Effects -> Wobbly Windows
rickcarlino 7mo ago
Sonique media player, Trillian messenger and NeoPlanet web browser. I was there, man. Before flat UI and sensible color schemes took hold. For a moment, it was pretty wild. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillian_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillian_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeoPlanet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeoPlanet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonique_(media_player) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonique_(media_player)
- IIsi50MHz 7mo ago
  Man, I forgot NeoPlanet. Thanks for the reminder! It was one of a bazillion IE-based browsers. I vaguely recall it had some nice features that seemed they should be in every browser…but I can't remember any of them now.
adamthecoder 7mo ago
So no one here has used winamp or seen an intro screen to a video game? Are you all chatgpt?
LastTrain 7mo ago
This is bringing back some horrible memories. When product wants your app to have a slide-out that looks like a paper scroll...
paddor 7mo ago
I agree on the memory usage of electron apps though. Been using Slack for 10 years now and it has never been slower. A freshly started Slack app on my macOS takes up nearly 1GB. It's nuts imho.
ecshafer 7mo ago
I wish Skeuomorphism returned. I like that these apps were cool and distinct. They were also running in way less memory than electron apps.
herf 7mo ago
I think HiDPI is another reason - these were from the "96 DPI" era where pixels looked the same on every screen. You can draw all your pixel art at 2x (or 3x) and scale it down at load time, but it's not super easy. Also, some of the RAM usage of modern apps is the need for a full backing store for each window - in the "true" win32 days like Windows 95, XP, or Win7 in classic mode, you'd be drawing directly to the front buffer, with no extra RAM/VRAM usage per pixel. Of course it flickered and looked bad, but it was fast and cheap.
- Night_Thastus 7mo ago
  The two root causes of these sort of windows disappearing is what you've said (DPI) and just a change in tastes. People now view those styles as kind of garish. Between that and the difficulty of making it work and look good at a variety of DPIs, it just wasn't going to stick around. I admit, I like things to have some more color and texture. Simple black and white boxes are a bit soul crushing. But I see why they disappeared.
DoctorOW 7mo ago
Here's the thing, you absolutely can do this in exactly the same way: Make the background transparent and draw within the bounds. You can argue about whether or not you should, but that is the argument. There's no technical limitation. https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/custom-window-styles https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/custom-windo...
bitwize 7mo ago
I remember some of the malarkey done with the X11 SHAPE extension. There was a program called xmascot. You could give it an xpm of a character or use one of the presets—typically a cute animal of some sort or a chibi anime waifu. It would show a dangling figurine of this character right on your desktop, autogenerating a few frames of rotation so it could swing from side to side. Of course X11 is four olds, and there's probably some security justification for not having nonrectangular windows in Wayland, and/or "that's a compositor implementation detail and outside the scope of the Wayland protocol".
speps 7mo ago
No need to mess with Win32, Godot supports it: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_window.html#class-window-property-transparent https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_window.... There’s a resurgence of transparent apps and games just because of that.
MisterTea 7mo ago
The weird windows were a fun fad for sure, but thankfully, a fad. Winamp was probably the best example of a program with an OS agnostic UI that didn't seem too out of place. It stood out for sure.
scottlu2 7mo ago
Minor trivia: the original motivation for adding SetWindowRgn was for Microsoft Bob characters and speech bubbles.
oefrha 7mo ago
Article only mentions manually building an irregularly shaped region from an image > Every horizontal run of non-transparent pixels becomes a tiny rectangle region, and those runs are combined into one final window region but there's an easier way: you just use a LWA_COLORKEY with SetLayeredWindowAttributes to make a color transparent, like a green screen. I recall building my own desktop mascot that way. Doesn't work with arbitrary image/content of course since the color can't appear in the content region.
peteforde 7mo ago
From what I understand, there's now a substantial stack of Windows app frameworks from Win32 to MFC and then 4-6 others that came after. There was a good post covering this last month: https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/03/13/microsoft-hasnt-had-a-coherent-gui-strategy-since-petzold/ https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/03/13/microsoft-hasnt-had-... The addition of frameworks like Qt and yes, web wrappers certainly complicates things unless you're presumably deep in it. What isn't clear to me is whether Win32 is still technically a viable choice for "modern" Windows 10/11 development. In other words, could you submit a Win32 app to the Microsoft Store, if that was something you felt like doing?
- kevin_thibedeau 7mo ago
  Win32 is allowed on the store.
- toast0 7mo ago
  > What isn't clear to me is whether Win32 is still technically a viable choice for "modern" Windows 10/11 development. In other words, could you submit a Win32 app to the Microsoft Store, if that was something you felt like doing? I believe so, although originally the store required other toolkits, they changed thier mind. That said, I don't think it's very important for windows programs to come from the microsoft store... the limitations are not worth the market, especially since the store is unreliable: at least in my experience, the installation can get messed up and it won't self repair, and then you can't install new software... Why would you want to support that, when you could just provide a downloadable installer and license keys? (And tell people the sequence to escape store only mode)
  - peteforde 7mo ago
    Don't get me wrong; I absolutely refuse to use the store. I'm just not deep enough in this to know the correct terminology. What I think I'm trying to ask is whether Win32 is still considered viable / equal opportunity compared to something built with, for example, WinForms. (To pick a name I remember.) From the outside, all of this churn makes me completely understand why web wrappers are so popular.
zerr 7mo ago
Besides custom outter shapes, you can as well have holes in your windows.
andai 7mo ago
To my delight, The article also mentioned desktop mascots! I saw a cool video recently where someone made a desktop pet in Godot, and it seems to be cross platform as well. It seems to be a little fiddly, but not quite win32 level fiddly :) So, maybe a more approachable option for the desktop pet enthusiast. https://youtu.be/x8BO9C6YtlE https://youtu.be/x8BO9C6YtlE
shatsky 7mo ago
Window transparency is available on all major platforms, and there are cross platform libs which support it, such as SDL3: https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/SDL_WINDOW_TRANSPARENT https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/SDL_WINDOW_TRANSPARENT (for rendering, making underlying windows visible where window surface pixels are transparent), https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/SDL_SetWindowShape https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/SDL_SetWindowShape (for input, making pointer events pass to underlying windows where surface pixels are fully transparent) I (ab)use it in my image (pre)viewer to have image presentation area always fitting image during pan&zoom without window borders limiting it, while having underlying windows visible outside of it (transparent fullscreen overlay): https://github.com/shatsky/lightning-image-viewer https://github.com/shatsky/lightning-image-viewer
netrap 7mo ago
Is it not the fact that Win32 is not the dominant platform anymore? It would be mobile phones now, right?

226 points by birdculture 7mo ago

> Win32 does not revolve around an update loop you own while (GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0) > 0) { TranslateMessage(&msg); DispatchMessage(&msg); } ...How much more could you own it, really? Is that the LLM talking?

pharrington 7mo ago
He means its about a message loop, as opposed to an update loop.
- ahartmetz 7mo ago
  The main loop of any GUI application is an event loop. You can't do that without using a platform API, and the platform API happens to be GetMessage() / TranslateMessage() / DispatchMessage(). There is nothing Win32 specific that somehow gives you less ownership of the main loop than you would have otherwise. If anything, it gives you more customization than most other platforms / frameworks by having three separate functions between which you can manipulate events. At best, what the article is trying to say is "This is a GUI application, so we need to handle user input and paint request events etc in the main loop. Here is how to set up such a main loop in Win32:" Win32 messages are higher-level than what you get out of select() and such, but that only serves to make it easier to customize things at the appropriate level of abstraction and with sufficient high-level information.
sumtechguy 7mo ago
Had one project where for some reason one of the devs wanted to access the messages before it got translated. The reasons are lost to time. You technically could create other types of application that is not CLI or 'windows'. But then you are own your own making the queues or console items. Think they were typically used for device drivers or background service manager tasks. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/subsystem-specify-subsystem?view=msvc-170 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/subsys... Pretty sure it just changes out what the default function that is called before winmain. So you probably could just switch out the first function called (dont remember the cli option for that). Most of the time you just picked the right type at project creation so it would feed correctly into the project solution which would set the right flags on build. But technically you could pick the most basic one and do it all yourself.
- jasomill 7mo ago
  Presumably you're talking about /SUBSYSTEM:NATIVE, and while you're correct that it changes the default entry point (to NtProcessStartup in this case), it also sets the Subsystem field in the PE optional header to IMAGE_SUBSYSTEM_NATIVE, which causes CreateProcess to fail to start the executable with ERROR_CHILD_NOT_COMPLETE ("The %1 application cannot be run in Win32 mode."). To see this, try press Windows+R and try running C:\Windows\System32\autochk.exe. There are workarounds, but AFAIK there's no officially supported way to launch a native executable. But that doesn't matter unless you want to avoid creating Win32 process structures, loading default Win32 DLLs, etc., as no windows are created and no messages are dispatched by code other than your own unless peculiar startup code is injected into your process at load time. In particular, you have access to untranslated messages by default, and if you don't want translated messages to be posted, just don't call TranslateMessage in your message loop.
  - direwolf20 7mo ago
    Microsoft Windows technologies like COM do create windows and run message loops on your behalf. When you drag on a title bar it runs a modal message loop in kernel mode. Took me a while to figure that one out...
Dwedit 7mo ago
"GetMessage" can do a lot of things you don't expect it to do. Ever used a global keyboard hook? Your keyboard handler code is called because "GetMessage" is calling other functions to have it get handled.

tdeck 7mo ago

> The point was usually not usability. It was identity. Is it bad that when I read that I immediately thought "this was written by an LLM."

mauriciolange 7mo ago
Absolutely, same feeling here. But I also see that the author wanted to say something, and finally he manages: it begins as a rant (generated by a prompt of course) the goes to some examples that are entertaining, at least making me remember how I did some things in the past.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
Karuma 7mo ago
Every single line in this article was written by an LLM...

mauriciolange 7mo ago

Some AI slop aside, nice article to help us remember that the platform is much more powerful if we dare to do some things without the crippling framework help.

Sharlin 7mo ago

Yeah, weird-shaped windows are definitely not something that should make a comeback. Just because you could doesn't mean you should. > Today, all Windows desktop apps look the same as they are the same; they are all built on crap React, Electron, electronbun, and Tauri browser wrappers that mimic the real Desktop apps. Desktop apps should look the same because they should use the OS GUI framework; that has nothing to do with React and Electron. I can't quite understand this argument; being webview based enables applications to look different from each other, like websites do, not similar. If they still do look similar, that's a good thing. > The point was usually not usability. It was identity. Yeah. And usability is sort of a big deal. Applications that implement their own widgets or color schemes or nonstandard shapes usually pay zero attention to usability or accessibility. They almost invariably lack all standard affordances and disregard the standard UX guidelines. Also, ironically the applications with the most "identity" today tend to be control panels and other accessories by HW manufacturers bundled with device drivers, and they also happen to be the crappiest, most terrible bloatware that an average user is likely to encounter.

hnthrowaway0315 7mo ago
I don't know. They look cool. If someone wants to bring them back it's a viable option. I'd definitely welcome it.
jordand 7mo ago
Accessibility is really important as well, as there's different laws and regulations covering people's rights here too. Modern cross-platform GUI frameworks (as heavy as they can be) have no issues supporting screen readers and HiDPI for people with sight difficulties.
reddalo 7mo ago
> that has nothing to do with React and Electron Not only that, but I think that Electron leads to the opposite problem: all apps look and behave differently, they don't follow platform guidelines, they look out of place.
- shooly 7mo ago

7bit 7mo ago

This starts out as a rant, wouldn't know how it ends. It's good weird-shaped windows disappeared. They are a usability nightmare and override what theme that the users wants for himself.

silon42 7mo ago
Have they? I see stupid corner radius way too often.

creshal 7mo ago

> The point was usually not usability. It was identity. And we're not even getting usability out of it! Each of those bland react-angles is subtly inconsistent with the OS, with each other, and very often, itself. And in 6 months everything will move around again, for no reason other than to keep the responsible managers employed, without improving UX. And a11y is crying in a corner somewhere, forgotten.

hackrmn 7mo ago

First, taking the opportunity this discussion presents, I'd like to state for the record, AGAIN, that I have long appreciated the Win32 API and still do -- not because it's great in and out of itself necessarily, it certainly has more warts than your average toad native to the Amazon, but because it de-facto worked for a long while through simple iteration (which grew warts too though) _and_ while it didn't demand Microsoft had everything for _everyone_, it kept Win32 development stable "at the bottom", as the "assembly" layer of Windows development, which everything else was free to build on, _in peace_. Ironically -- looking at the volume of APIs and SDKs Microsoft is churning out today, by comparison, through sheer mass and velocity -- they've proven utterly unable to be sole guardians of their own operating system. There's a plethora of articles shared on Hacker News on this inadequacy on their part to converge on some subset of software that a Windows developer can use to just start with a window or two of their own, on the screen. Win32 _gave you exactly that_. And even `CreateWindow2` export would have worked beyond what `CreateWindow` or `CreateWindowEx` couldn't provide, because you could count on someone who loved it more to just abstract it with a _thin_ layer like WxWidgets etc. Things _worked_. Now there's internal strife between the .NET and "C++ or bust" teams at Microsoft, and the downstream developers are just everything between confused and irritated, this is entirely self-inflicted, Microsoft. It's also a sign of bloat -- if the company could split these groups into subsidiaries, they could compete on actual value delivered, but under the Microsoft umbrella, the result is entirely different. Second -- and this is a different point entirely -- not two weeks ago there was at least _two_ articles shared here which I read with a mix of mild amusement and sober agreement, about the _opposite_ of what the author of the article linked above, advocates for -- _idiomatic_ design (usually one that's internally consistent): * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738827 ("Bring back Idiomatic Design") * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47547009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47547009 ("Make macOS consistently bad unironically") What I am getting at is that this is clearly different people vocally preferring different -- _opposite_ -- UX experiences. From my brief stint with graphic design, I know there's no silver bullet there either -- consistency is on some level in a locked-horns conflict with creativity (which in part suggests _defiance_), but it's just funny that we now have examples of both, with the above, to which I should add: > This is why we can't have nice things! Also, while we "peasants" argue about which way good design should lean -- someone likes their WinAmp-like alpha-blended non-uniform windows and someone else maintains anything that's not defined by the OS is sheer heresy -- the market for one or the other is kept well fueled and another round on the carousel we all go (money happily changing hands). For my part I wish we'd settle, as much as settling can be done. The APIs should support both, but the user should get to decide, not the developer. Which is incidentally what CSS was _ideally_ kind of was supposed to give us, but we're not really there with that, and I am digressing.

NooneAtAll3 7mo ago

is it possible to do this in linux?

tdeck 7mo ago
Sure, in X11 https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xextproto/shape.html https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xextproto/shape.html And for Wayland I found this https://dev.tizen.narkive.com/AkKHZRHh/wayland-non-rectangular-wayland-window-input-through https://dev.tizen.narkive.com/AkKHZRHh/wayland-non-rectangul...
bawolff 7mo ago
xeyes must work somehow.
- 1718627440 7mo ago
  Yeah X11 even allows for holes in windows.
shatsky 7mo ago
SDL3 can handle both Wayland and X11: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47790895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47790895

itmitica 7mo ago

Talking about choice. The article is presented in non-avoidable dark mode. Enough already! Say it with me: dark mode does not directly reduces the brightness, which should be your main concern, it only masks the brightness, which is BAD!

IIsi50MHz 7mo ago
Colour me confused. Dark mode on an oled reduces brightness (and power consumption). Dark mode on my work laptop (not oled) reduces backlight brightness. This is auto-tragical, because it seems to only respond to changes in the display buffer's average requested luminance, instead of using an ambient light sensor. Dropping backlight toward minimum when the room is bright makes the screen mostly unreadable. And there's no control for this. Dell should be ashamed! More importantly, if you place any darkening filter, including a darkened set of pixels, in front of a light source, it reduces the brightness. But perhaps the main concern you intended is "power consumption", not "emitted lux"? If, I'd say "Depends on your application.".
- itmitica 7mo ago
  Dark modes alone only reduce lightness, are not reducing brightness. That's the distinction some are missing. And the most important parts: - no dark mode is actually needed, for me anyway, once I reduce brightness; - I have serious retina artifacts issues after reading a dark mode web page like that one.

donatj 7mo ago

I am reminded of how the CD burning app Disco for Mac would actually smoke while your disc was burning. Standard looking Window but with semitransparent smoke billowing out the top. If I recall, Steve Jobs showed it off on stage and loved it.

okanat 7mo ago

> freaking memory is 77% full when freaking Windows 11 starts up. Unused memory is wasted memory. 77% is basically caches + private process memory + shared memory. Unless you are comparing by the private committed working set, you usually have no idea of the actual usage. .Net apps and browsers often allocate overcommitted memory to avoid making system calls. I get it, using browsers for ToDo apps is slow, however measuring their impact is harder than you think. At the same time the best x-platform UI framework is the browser. Qt comes next but it lacks man-decade amount of fixes/polishing to match native font support and text rendering, media handling, accessibility support, hw acceleration and memory pressure behaviors of Skia and Chromium.

iggldiggl 7mo ago
> Unused memory is wasted memory. 77% is basically caches + private process memory + shared memory. In simplified overviews, Windows counts file system caches (standby memory) as free (respectively available) memory, so if 77% of 32 GB is to be taken literally, it still sounds rather on the high side.
pidgeon_lover 7mo ago
> Unused memory is wasted memory. Why does my computer freeze and become unusable when the RAM is 90%, then? That myth is complete nonsense - RAM is like a seatbelt or a crumple zone, serves as a buffer between the user and crashes, and will hopefully never be tested under use.

gyomu 7mo ago

I think those observations get to the crux of the issue: > That is why weird shaped windows are easy to prototype and expensive to polish. > But there is an issue with Win32 API programming. And the truth is that custom windows mean doing everything yourself, controlling every Windows message, and that is fragile Software used to be made by small teams (often of 1). Once released it could be expected to be stable for years. The priorities have shifted to software that can be built and iterated on quickly, by large teams with high turnover. It’s not uncommon for popular software to get updated weekly, daily. I suspect this is also why skeuomorphic design lost the evolutionary race - everything needs to be tweaked and aligned and optimized ad hoc. If you want to reorganize the interface, it means potentially recreating a lot of assets. Flat design is interchangeable and modular. These trends will only get stronger with agentic software engineering - the incentives reward scale and speed. This is also why we don’t really see large ornate hand carved wooden funiture anymore, it’s all flatpack particleboard now.

iamcalledrob 7mo ago
> But there is an issue with Win32 API programming. And the truth is that custom windows mean doing everything yourself, controlling every Windows message, and that is fragile This isn't actually true though. You can delegate to the default window proc, and only customise what you want. Sure, if your window is now a triangle, you need to think about how resizing is going to work. But you don't need to re-implement everything from scratch -- only the defaults that aren't compatible with your new design.
- sumtechguy 7mo ago
  > This isn't actually true though. You can delegate to the default window proc, and only customise what you want. Yeah that was my memory of doing this stuff. You basically just added what you wanted to the case statement (or other hooks depending on your framework). Then dump the rest onto the default proc. The default 'wizards' usually made the standard petzold structure for you and you didnt even really have to think much about it. Now if you were doing everything by yourself just make sure you read the docs and make sure you call the default in the right cases.

iamcalledrob 7mo ago

Personally, I find that any Windows application that is remotely polished will have its own win32 WindowProc anyway, even if written in higher-level tech. For example, if you want custom window controls, you need to use a WindowProc + WM_NCHITTEST to tell windows where the buttons are, so the OS can do things like display the window snapping controls when you hover over the "Maximize" button. Sidenote: as a designer, its disappointing how many Windows apps are subtly broken in a bunch of these ways. Its not that hard. "Modern" UI frameworks generally don't do this work for you either, there's a real lack of attention to detail.

patwolf 7mo ago

It reminds me a bit of one of the reasons Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes didn't catch on. It's difficult to make rectangular furniture work efficiently in a non-rectangular space. Likewise, it's difficult to efficiently use a non-rectangular window on a rectangular monitor.

oorza 7mo ago
They're becoming more popular in Florida, as a poured concrete geodesic dome is basically immune to a hurricane.

tariky 7mo ago

This article brings some flashback from Winamp skinning days. Anyone else liked to skin they Winamp?

solstice 7mo ago
Oh yeah. Browsing the submissions and forums on customize.org are among my first forays into the internet.
jayd16 7mo ago
How else would you whip the llama's ass?
- Dwedit 7mo ago
  You summon Wesley Willis of course (rip).

mark-r 7mo ago

I worked on Windows apps for many years. The problem is that the Win32 interface only really gets you 90% control. The hardest thing I've ever done was when our product manager decided that color theming our app was an essential new feature. That's when you find out that certain Windows features like scroll bars under certain conditions bypass the usual message loop completely, because they know they can get away with it. The part I remember most vividly was recreating the lowly MessageBox from scratch, because none of the internals of the system supplied one were exposed in a way that you could modify them.

hnthrowaway0315 7mo ago
Wow this could be painful, to try to recreate something from scratch. Would QT make it work?
- sumtechguy 7mo ago
  It was more of you had to know where to grab control. It was not always clear. With some of them it was dead easy and you can do it on window creation. Others you had to hook it out by playing with the window params (SetWindowLong) and getting the underlying control and then changing it. Some controls had their own bespoke way where you would send messages to the control then it would take care of it. Some you would have to iterate over the control list that window controlled and change it. In some cases it was just such a pain you were better off making your own custom control window that was just a mashup of other controls that you could control. It was one part experimentation and one part reading the docs (if the control had it). Now if it was a built in windows control you were playing with. You had to take on the risk on windows version update the customization you did would break if you did non documented things.
  - mark-r 7mo ago
    The biggest problem was when there was an established protocol, but it wasn't always followed. I remember scroll bars being the worst. Usually you could respond to the messages and everything would work the way you want, but there were some edge cases where Windows would update those scroll bars without even telling you it was doing so. And of course it would paint those updates in the default colors.

ZoomZoomZoom 7mo ago

I'm all for Win32, but those odd-shapes and custom skins were the precursors and the normalizing precedent for the current default mentality of "visual identity = branding" that's been killing desktop computing experience for years and is one of the reasons we have to endure reacts, electrons and multitude of half-baked widget libraries that consist of things looking like no particular control but all feature blurry text rendering, flaky accessibility, negative information density and their own special sets of bugs. Unless you're building a Blender or an Ardour or, I don't know, a trading platform or a game, an individualized GUI should be the last of your priorities.

hnthrowaway0315 7mo ago
It's different. Electron apps all look the same without actually making much efforts to make them "personal" -- they just want to release an app ASAP so they chose Electron. On the other hand, the Win32 era "skins" like they ones used in Video Player and Winamp are very personal -- they have distinct styles. Maybe we don't like the styles, but at least they are trying to make a unique taste. Electron apps do not have tastes. Unless you count flat design + as little UI as possible as a taste. Modern operating systems are for servers, for corporations. They are not personal. Linux was for hackers and sysadmins then, not power users, and for servers now. Linux does make a come back for desktop because Windows team makes such a herculean effort to trash its own product. The Win 3.1 - Win XP era are the real "personal" era.
- bri3d 7mo ago
  > Electron apps all look the same without actually making much efforts to make them "personal" -- they just want to release an app ASAP so they chose Electron. Which is the most goofy thing about the whole situation! I would argue that the push for “visual identity” was largely responsible for the drive towards web apps vs. native apps in the early 00s. In exchange we got all of these tortured UI frameworks built to paper over hypertext abstractions that weren’t well suited to application development to start with. And now we use these frameworks to make bland applications again!
  - 7mo ago

torgoguys 7mo ago

>A freaking notepad app takes almost 50mb in memory when equivalent NOTEPAD done in pure Win32 C takes [only] 1.8mb of memory. Kids these days! A full 1.8MB of memory for little more than a wrapper around an existing win32 multi-line text box control! (Note that I added the "[only]" in the quote above to make it clear what the author meant since the quote was ripped from context).

hnthrowaway0315 7mo ago
I wonder what is the memory foot print of the notepad application in NT 3.1/3.5? The OS is supposed to run on 16MB systems so 1.8MB is definitely a LOT.
NetMageSCW 7mo ago
Having written a full notepad clone (.LOG works) for Windows CE using MFC, it is a little bit more than that.

phendrenad2 7mo ago

Weird window shapes were really great when you were seated at a desktop computer. Not so great on laptops. Not viable on tablets or phones.

ihuk 7mo ago

I believe I went to high school with the author, so this took me down memory lane. I wrote an FTP client back in 1999 using only the Win32 API and C. Good times.

51Cards 7mo ago

I used to write a lot of native Windows corporate software in the 90's and 2000's and my standard login window was a floating draggable oval. Nothing else was oddly shaped but I did get a lot of comments on the oval login windows. It was a bit about being unique, marking my "style", and just because I could. I will add though in the 90's it did make me nuts when entire applications were wildly shaped and you had to figure out how to use them. Editing this to add: I really miss that level of coding and working with Win32. I get that the world has moved on and HTML or some runtime flavour of it has taken over but I too lament the los of true control I once had. I hate that my stack can be broken because some runtime was updated out of my control or the crazy load times of simple projects. I know many today would say it was messy and problematic (and it could be) but it's definitely a lost art form.

cachius 7mo ago
Also the 3 pane GIMP experience.
- panzi 7mo ago
  I think that's just how early Mac Photoshop worked. So they copied that and didn't update it for decades.

Aardwolf 7mo ago

> A freaking notepad app takes almost 50mb in memory when equivalent NOTEPAD done in pure Win32 C takes 1.8mb of memory. 1.8MB? I don't know how much it took on our 386 computer with 4MB RAM and windows 3.11, but hopefully not that much

jasomill 7mo ago
Given that I assume NOTEPAD.EXE is still basically a window containing an optional status bar and a multiline edit control with a custom WNDPROC for managing features like word wrap, I'm actually curious why it opens with such a large private working set, even on Windows 11. Possibly space for data allocated by one of the 50+ DLLs it loads directly or indirectly to support features like Unicode text input and rendering. Actually, it gets much worse. By default, recent Windows 11 versions use a completely new version of Notepad with support for things like tabs, styled text, and AI (!). Even with all the new features disabled, this one has a 32 MB private working set before opening a single file. Amusingly, GNU Emacs, a.k.a. Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping at a time when entry-level UNIX workstations actually shipped with as little as 4 MB RAM, opens on the same machine with a smaller (25 MB) private working set than the new Notepad. To be fair to at least one team at Microsoft, the EDIT.EXE text-mode editor recently added to Windows 11, with a user interface that somehow manages to be more consistent with basic Windows UI conventions than many modern Windows GUI apps despite not being a GUI app at all, opens with a private working set size of only 520 kB.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
Dwedit 7mo ago
Even a minimal Hello World program (1.5KB executable) takes 340K of active private working set, and 552K of commit size. Windows just don't allow programs to use any less memory than that. You're bound by what the system libraries allocate (either statically or dynamically). Once you create a window, even if you haven't drawn that window, your minimum is now around 500KB.

mercwear 7mo ago

This reminds me of the mid to late 90's warez scene, all of the key crackers had neat interfaces like this.

PaulHoule 7mo ago

I remember in the late 1990s Windows applications, particularly the little weird ones like the app you would use to work a (flatbed) scanner, often tried hard to have unique themed appearances. The industry seemed to lose interest by 2005 or so. I got a job as a Silverlight programmer not long after that which got me to learn WPF and WPF had facilities for theming that seemed capable and well thought out (would be easy, for instance, to turn pill buttons diagonal) but these hardly ever got used, I think the industry had moved on. Lately I have had to run Office '98 which tries to take over your desktop with Clippy and other things and it still tries to do it to Windows 11. The borderless windows from Office '98 don't quite look right now but it all works.

rbanffy 7mo ago

> Desktop UI culture shifted from “look at this crazy skin” to “work reliably and get out of my way.” I miss the wobbly windows I had in Linux when we started playing with Compiz. Or neko on my Sun machines. As for weird-shaped windows, I think it is about ergonomics. A different shape requires more thinking to operate. Form should follow function, not the other way around - if the odd shape serves a purpose, then it makes sense. If it's just to show off, or to make the app look different, then it becomes a usability issue.

jasomill 7mo ago
I don't, though I still have fond memories of olwm, AfterStep, and WindowMaker, as well as the NEXTSTEP 3.3 GUI running on greyscale NeXT hardware fished out of a dumpster behind the Indiana University School of Journalism in the late '90s following a hot tip from a friend who worked for university IT (as well as NeXT tech support who graciously sent me a full OS media kit free of charge so I could actually use it).
- rbanffy 7mo ago
  Olwm was gorgeous. Elegant and stays out of the way.
seritools 7mo ago
> I miss the wobbly windows I had in Linux when we started playing with Compiz. KDE still has them: Settings -> Window Management -> Desktop Effects -> Wobbly Windows

rickcarlino 7mo ago

Sonique media player, Trillian messenger and NeoPlanet web browser. I was there, man. Before flat UI and sensible color schemes took hold. For a moment, it was pretty wild. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillian_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillian_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeoPlanet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeoPlanet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonique_(media_player) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonique_(media_player)

IIsi50MHz 7mo ago
Man, I forgot NeoPlanet. Thanks for the reminder! It was one of a bazillion IE-based browsers. I vaguely recall it had some nice features that seemed they should be in every browser…but I can't remember any of them now.

adamthecoder 7mo ago

So no one here has used winamp or seen an intro screen to a video game? Are you all chatgpt?

LastTrain 7mo ago

This is bringing back some horrible memories. When product wants your app to have a slide-out that looks like a paper scroll...

paddor 7mo ago

I agree on the memory usage of electron apps though. Been using Slack for 10 years now and it has never been slower. A freshly started Slack app on my macOS takes up nearly 1GB. It's nuts imho.

ecshafer 7mo ago

I wish Skeuomorphism returned. I like that these apps were cool and distinct. They were also running in way less memory than electron apps.

herf 7mo ago

I think HiDPI is another reason - these were from the "96 DPI" era where pixels looked the same on every screen. You can draw all your pixel art at 2x (or 3x) and scale it down at load time, but it's not super easy. Also, some of the RAM usage of modern apps is the need for a full backing store for each window - in the "true" win32 days like Windows 95, XP, or Win7 in classic mode, you'd be drawing directly to the front buffer, with no extra RAM/VRAM usage per pixel. Of course it flickered and looked bad, but it was fast and cheap.

Night_Thastus 7mo ago
The two root causes of these sort of windows disappearing is what you've said (DPI) and just a change in tastes. People now view those styles as kind of garish. Between that and the difficulty of making it work and look good at a variety of DPIs, it just wasn't going to stick around. I admit, I like things to have some more color and texture. Simple black and white boxes are a bit soul crushing. But I see why they disappeared.

DoctorOW 7mo ago

Here's the thing, you absolutely can do this in exactly the same way: Make the background transparent and draw within the bounds. You can argue about whether or not you should, but that is the argument. There's no technical limitation. https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/custom-window-styles https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/custom-windo...

bitwize 7mo ago

I remember some of the malarkey done with the X11 SHAPE extension. There was a program called xmascot. You could give it an xpm of a character or use one of the presets—typically a cute animal of some sort or a chibi anime waifu. It would show a dangling figurine of this character right on your desktop, autogenerating a few frames of rotation so it could swing from side to side. Of course X11 is four olds, and there's probably some security justification for not having nonrectangular windows in Wayland, and/or "that's a compositor implementation detail and outside the scope of the Wayland protocol".

speps 7mo ago

No need to mess with Win32, Godot supports it: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_window.html#class-window-property-transparent https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_window.... There’s a resurgence of transparent apps and games just because of that.

MisterTea 7mo ago

The weird windows were a fun fad for sure, but thankfully, a fad. Winamp was probably the best example of a program with an OS agnostic UI that didn't seem too out of place. It stood out for sure.

scottlu2 7mo ago

Minor trivia: the original motivation for adding SetWindowRgn was for Microsoft Bob characters and speech bubbles.

oefrha 7mo ago

Article only mentions manually building an irregularly shaped region from an image > Every horizontal run of non-transparent pixels becomes a tiny rectangle region, and those runs are combined into one final window region but there's an easier way: you just use a LWA_COLORKEY with SetLayeredWindowAttributes to make a color transparent, like a green screen. I recall building my own desktop mascot that way. Doesn't work with arbitrary image/content of course since the color can't appear in the content region.

peteforde 7mo ago

From what I understand, there's now a substantial stack of Windows app frameworks from Win32 to MFC and then 4-6 others that came after. There was a good post covering this last month: https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/03/13/microsoft-hasnt-had-a-coherent-gui-strategy-since-petzold/ https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/03/13/microsoft-hasnt-had-... The addition of frameworks like Qt and yes, web wrappers certainly complicates things unless you're presumably deep in it. What isn't clear to me is whether Win32 is still technically a viable choice for "modern" Windows 10/11 development. In other words, could you submit a Win32 app to the Microsoft Store, if that was something you felt like doing?

kevin_thibedeau 7mo ago
Win32 is allowed on the store.
toast0 7mo ago
> What isn't clear to me is whether Win32 is still technically a viable choice for "modern" Windows 10/11 development. In other words, could you submit a Win32 app to the Microsoft Store, if that was something you felt like doing? I believe so, although originally the store required other toolkits, they changed thier mind. That said, I don't think it's very important for windows programs to come from the microsoft store... the limitations are not worth the market, especially since the store is unreliable: at least in my experience, the installation can get messed up and it won't self repair, and then you can't install new software... Why would you want to support that, when you could just provide a downloadable installer and license keys? (And tell people the sequence to escape store only mode)
- peteforde 7mo ago
  Don't get me wrong; I absolutely refuse to use the store. I'm just not deep enough in this to know the correct terminology. What I think I'm trying to ask is whether Win32 is still considered viable / equal opportunity compared to something built with, for example, WinForms. (To pick a name I remember.) From the outside, all of this churn makes me completely understand why web wrappers are so popular.

zerr 7mo ago

Besides custom outter shapes, you can as well have holes in your windows.

andai 7mo ago

To my delight, The article also mentioned desktop mascots! I saw a cool video recently where someone made a desktop pet in Godot, and it seems to be cross platform as well. It seems to be a little fiddly, but not quite win32 level fiddly :) So, maybe a more approachable option for the desktop pet enthusiast. https://youtu.be/x8BO9C6YtlE https://youtu.be/x8BO9C6YtlE

shatsky 7mo ago

Window transparency is available on all major platforms, and there are cross platform libs which support it, such as SDL3: https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/SDL_WINDOW_TRANSPARENT https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/SDL_WINDOW_TRANSPARENT (for rendering, making underlying windows visible where window surface pixels are transparent), https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/SDL_SetWindowShape https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/SDL_SetWindowShape (for input, making pointer events pass to underlying windows where surface pixels are fully transparent) I (ab)use it in my image (pre)viewer to have image presentation area always fitting image during pan&zoom without window borders limiting it, while having underlying windows visible outside of it (transparent fullscreen overlay): https://github.com/shatsky/lightning-image-viewer https://github.com/shatsky/lightning-image-viewer

netrap 7mo ago

Is it not the fact that Win32 is not the dominant platform anymore? It would be mobile phones now, right?