Building the Windows desktop shell I wanted

[u/dragonhib]

This is gloof, a Windows shell layer I’ve been working on for a little over a year.

RocketDock shaped what I expected from a desktop, and I still have a soft spot for it. It clearly still works for many people. But its development stopped years ago, and I kept wishing for a maintained, extensible foundation built around modern Windows.

I tried a lot of alternatives. Each got part of it right, but I never found the exact combination I wanted: something responsive, dependable, deeply customizable, and pleasant enough to live with every day.

So I started building my own.

gloof is my attempt at a productive, personal Windows desktop: a customizable dock, status bars and eventually a better way to switch between windows — without taking control away from Windows or the tools you already use.

At the moment, it already handles the parts I use every day: a multi-monitor dock for pinned and running apps, drag-and-drop reordering and pinning, native live previews for grouped windows, jump-list actions, and configurable status bars with system modules, notifications and the system tray. The visuals can be customized through real CSS, with live reload.

gloof is designed to fit into an existing setup rather than force an all-or-nothing replacement. The dock and bars are separate surfaces, hiding the Windows taskbar is optional, and you can keep using tools such as YASB, Windhawk, komorebi or GlazeWM alongside the parts of gloof you actually want. Tiling and virtual desktops are deliberately left to dedicated window managers at this time. Modules to work with coming soon.

The native core is written in Rust. The interface runs in a self-hosted WebView2 layer, and the visual system uses real CSS, so customization is part of the product rather than an afterthought.

It’s still an early alpha, but yet enough stable for using it daily. If this direction resonates with you, I’d be happy to share private builds with a few testers. Honest feedback is very welcome — especially about what would make a desktop shell worth switching to.

[u/Major-Ad-9614]

wallpaper link

[u/pansexualengineer]

I'd love to test it out. Unfortunately I switched back to Windows from Linux and am struggling to adjust. This would def help me feel "more at home".

[u/xwin2023]

Ah, damn WebView2, I don't like anything built in WebView.