Starling Windows Shell 0.2.0 — now on Windows 10, and the first outside reports closed
The Windows shell, replaced per user — dock, Start menu, desktop, file
manager and notification tray, with Explorer kept alive underneath for
packaged apps and file dialogs. No admin rights, no system files touched:
one registry value in your own account, and Explorer comes back the moment
you ask. 0.2.0 runs on Windows 10 as well as Windows 11.
What changed since 0.1.0.
- Windows 10 (22H2) is supported with the same binary and the same look.
The dock's icons start in the corner there, as Windows 10's own do. - The first outside reports, all closed (#26–#29): the taskbar alignment
follows Windows' own setting (change it in Settings and the dock follows);
right-clicking the bar itself opens its menu, with Task Manager and
Taskbar settings on it; an app launched from the dock comes up in front;
a new dock starts from the taskbar pins you already had. - Minimized windows are parked off screen by the setting that actually
decides it, on both Windows, instead of relying on Explorer having done it. - A profile that never set a wallpaper gets the theme's, instead of black,
and the desktop now fills the screen when the display's resolution changes. - The Start menu's File Explorer opens Starling's own file manager — the
same one the dock's Files tile and Win+E open, not Windows' Explorer. - The desktop stays painted when an Explorer starts beside the shell —
including after an Explorer crash. - Windows 10's Explorer no longer crashes at logon. It was ours: a
message telling its taskbar to auto-hide reached it before the taskbar
was built. It now waits.
On Windows 10. The dock, the Start menu, and the shell's own file
explorer, on a Windows 10 22H2 VM running this build.
Measured on the same PC, filmed side by side (medians of 20, 0.1.0 numbers;
nothing on this path changed):
| Starling | Windows 11 | |
|---|---|---|
| Start menu, key to fully drawn | 100 ms | 300 ms |
| Right-click menu, complete | 67 ms | 267 ms |
| Win+E to a usable file list | 83 ms | 1116 ms |
Install. StarlingSetup-0.2.0.exe — double-click, confirm, sign out
and back in. It installs to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Starling and registers
per user; other accounts keep Explorer, and nothing needs administrator
rights. The zip is the same payload with the options: Install.ps1 takes
-Now (switch this session), -NoRegister, and -Destination.
Leave. Uninstall.ps1 un-registers, restores Explorer's taskbar, and
removes the files (-KeepFiles to keep them). If a Starling process is
ever killed rather than closed, WinShellBar.exe --restore-taskbar puts
Explorer's taskbar and tray back — and if the shell crash-loops it
un-registers itself and hands the session back to Explorer on its own.
The full install/uninstall/recovery story: docs/WINDOWS-INSTALL.md.
Unsigned, for now. SmartScreen will warn on first run (More info → Run
anyway); a machine with Smart App Control enforcing will refuse it. Signing
is planned (docs/WINDOWS-SIGNING.md) and 0.2.0 ships before it.
The exact binary in these downloads passed the shell's 28-check gate three
times: installed from this very setup exe on a clean Windows 11 VM with no
toolchain on it, on a Windows 10 22H2 VM, and on the physical Windows 11
machine. The checks cover the session processes, the work-area reservation,
minimize and restore, the file explorer (its context menu, and copy/move/
rename/cut-paste/delete-to-bin with their undos), packaged-app launch and
identity, close-refusal, and kill-and-respawn. Built from branch
release-winshell-0.2.0, engine pinned by the same branch name in
starling-engine; the commit and engine are in BUILD-STAMP.txt inside the
archive.
sha256:
StarlingSetup-0.2.0.exe7c16f164a112bad0f3fcc47e51d9be4e9ef381d2f8a76500fce21d8141e3e392Starling-0.2.0-win-x64.zip69012108e7c3f208db8d7924a75518d141e43e631ca53f693974bf1908d89853