WinRestyle

Make Windows 11 beautiful, customizable, and fast — open source.

WinRestyle replaces parts of the Windows 11 shell (starting with the taskbar) with modern, GPU-accelerated, fully themeable components. Install it, tick the components you want, hit Restyle Now — that's it.

Warning

Pre-alpha / Phase 0. WinRestyle performs a full shell replacement: it swaps the Windows shell for its own. This is powerful but invasive — a bug can leave you with a blank desktop. Only run it inside a disposable Windows 11 VM with snapshots until we say otherwise. See Safety below.

What it does

• 🎨 Restyle the taskbar (Start menu, theming engine, and more to come).
• ⚡ Native & fast — Rust + Direct2D/DirectComposition, no Electron, no bloat.
• 🧩 Modular — pick components to install/uninstall from one screen.
• 🛟 Recoverable — emergency restore hotkey and automatic rollback built in.

Safety

Because WinRestyle becomes the shell, safety is the foundation, not an afterthought. Three independent guarantees:

1. Watchdog process — a separate guardian (wr-watchdog) owns the Win + Ctrl + F1 emergency-restore hotkey, monitors the shell, and auto-restores explorer.exe if the shell crash-loops.
2. Registry backup + rollback — we set the per-user shell (HKCU\…\Winlogon\Shell) only, never machine-wide, and stash the original value so uninstall/restore is always possible.
3. No blind commit — the installer trial-runs the new shell before writing the registry, and dev happens in a snapshotted VM.

If something goes wrong: press Win + Ctrl + F1. If that fails, log out and back in (the per-user shell change can be reverted from another admin account), or restore your VM snapshot.

Architecture

A Cargo workspace of focused crates:

Crate	Role
wr-core	Shared types, config schema, shell-registry backup/restore.
wr-ipc	Named-pipe protocol between watchdog ⇄ shell ⇄ installer.
wr-watchdog	Guardian process: emergency hotkey, crash-loop fallback.
wr-shell	Shell host: paints desktop, hosts the system tray, lifecycle.
wr-taskbar	The flagship taskbar UI (Direct2D/DirectComposition).
wr-installer	Manager UI: component checklist + Restyle Now / uninstall.

See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md and docs/ROADMAP.md for the full design and phased plan.

Building

WinRestyle targets Windows 11 (x86_64) and builds with the MSVC toolchain. You cannot meaningfully run it on Linux/macOS (it links Windows shell APIs), though you can edit and check it anywhere.

# On Windows 11, with Rust (https://rustup.rs) and the MSVC build tools:
rustup target add x86_64-pc-windows-msvc
cargo build --workspace

Testing

An automated harness (run inside the VM) covers the whole safety matrix — crashes, kills, hangs, crash-loops, registry round-trips — against the real binaries:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts\vm-test.ps1

See docs/TESTING.md. Only one test (real logon swap + emergency hotkey) remains manual, once per release.

Status

🚧 Phase 1 — minimal shell. The Phase 0 safety harness is complete and fully validated in a Win11 VM (automated suite green): mutual watchdog ⇄ shell supervision, heartbeat-based hang detection over the named pipe, crash-loop caps, and mid-session explorer.exe restore all work. No UI yet — next up: config loading, then the first painted pixels (wallpaper). Follow the roadmap; design decisions live in docs/decisions/.

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.