Endless Paradigm

I've tried a few in the past, but none have really suited me, so I'm still using explorer.


Does anyone here use a custom shell though?

Thanks zinga, now you've made me curious about the status of litestep which I used to favor quite a bit. I knew there were a few others but I preferred LS over the the others. Something to play with again. Looks like it's still under dev at a slow pace with 5 members on the team. Latest installer was released back in June. I'm going to check it out and see what themes are available these days.

Custom Windows shell? Do you mean using custom themes on windows? you mention explorer.

custom shells replace explorer.exe meaning complete customization of windows layouts and themes

kinda like peopl mke psp themes using prxs an rcos
but
you completly use user created prxs and rcos completly reweritten containing no sony code

Well, my OS is still windows XP but it has a vista look as for desktop, taskbar, icons, sounds, etc. I patched the uxtheme.dll to have custom themes. But I have no idea how to replace the shell for explorer.exe.

what pereeski said.. i have a patched uxtheme.dll
so its just a theme :D ... or is that the same thing?

heres my current :
previous

using a patched uxtheme.dll is not the same as using explorer.exe as your shell. When you use an alternative shell it modifies the shell variable in the registry so it no longer points to explorer.exe. explorer.exe utilizes the uxtheme.dll. The replacement I mentioned earlier is a complete replacement, it can be augmented by custom modules, hotkeys etc....

For anyone interested here's a few links

Here is the wikipedia entry for litestep:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep

I found this site to have a small handful of themes for the shell:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep

and

http://customize.org/litestep/themes

and here is where the current maintainers appear to host their site:

http://www.lsdev.org/

xopher Wrote:using a patched uxtheme.dll is the same as using explorer.exe as your shell.

if that be the case.. then yeah ..
im using a custom shell :)

I tried litestep for sometime... but it made my system very unstable. But I liked it a lot. It has some really nice themes. Is LiteStep vista compatible?? I mean stable-compatible..

boogschd Wrote:

xopher Wrote:using a patched uxtheme.dll is the same as using explorer.exe as your shell.

if that be the case.. then yeah ..
im using a custom shell :)

lol the leaving out of a single word can so completely change the meaning of the sentence.........should've said "using a patched uxtheme.dll is not the same as using explorer.exe as your shell."

From what I was reading the latest build originally seemed to have Vista compatibility in mind but in the release notes it states Vista compatibility was not included. The seem to hint toward next version but who knows when and if that will ever come to life