I've talked about Windows 11 customization quite a bit here on XDA, covering various methods for tweaking how the OS looks as well as many apps that change not only the visuals, but also its functionality. Recently, one of our commenters mentioned something called Windhawk, and being the curious mind I am, I looked it up.

After trying it out, I'm incredibly impressed by what this app can do. I've only had a short amount of time to play around with it, but this may just be one of the best free tools for customizing Windows 11. There are so many cool options here that are definitely worth diving into, especially if you like tinkering.

A long list of mods

Windhawk isn't just an app, it's an ecosystem

First things first, let's talk about what Windhawk actually is. It's not just a customization app, but rather, an ecosystem of customizations for all kinds of things on Windows 11. Windhawk is home to a ton of community-made mods that can change all kinds of behaviors and UI elements in Windows 11. I couldn't possibly cover all of them, but just from spending a few minutes with the app, it's super impressive.

When you install Windhawk, you mostly just get a mod browser, and then you can choose from the list of featured mods, or browse the entire community for more of them. There are dozens of mods available at writing time, but I could definitely see this expanding even more. Each mod shows you how many users have installed it, a demonstration of what it can do, and the source code for what makes it all work. You can even make some of your own changes and fork a mod if you want to distribute a different version of it. It's really cool stuff.

Customizing the Start menu

One of the more interesting stylers available

I've tried a few mods for Windhawk so far, but one of the most interesting ones to me personally is the Windows 11 Start menu styler, which you can find here. This is a surprisingly capable tool for modifying what the Start menu looks like, and it's very impressive that it's available for free among a set of many other tools.

The Start menu styler comes with multiple preset themes that can do all kinds of things. Want to remove the Recommended section from the Start menu? There's an option for that. Want the All apps list next to the pinned area? There's a style for that. What if the Start menu was completely translucent? Yeah, we can do that too.

All of these are different themes, which means the settings from one aren't combined with another by default. However, you can modify the code in whatever way you see fit to get just the right look for you, combining elements from different themes. Sadly, I wasn't able to figure this out to make the perfect Start menu for me, but it's easy to see this is a very powerful tool, and I'm excited to see what others can do with it. My favorite theme right now is probably the SidebySide option, which gives me back the All Apps list on the Start menu without needing extra clicks. It's just great that all of this is available for free, and it makes tools like Start11 feel overpriced.

There's a taskbar styler, too

Go even further with customization

If the Start menu customization isn't enough for you, another big mod available to download is the taskbar styler, which does a lot of the same things. The themes available are actually a bit different, but these are just user-created themes, so you could create a pair of themes that go hand in hand.

In fact, someone already has, because a couple of the themes are made to match the Start menu and taskbar perfectly, including the RosePine theme. It's all really impressive stuff, and if you're someone with a knack for development, you can contribute to these mods and make them even more interesting.

On the topic of taskbar customization, I also tried another mod that changes the behavior of taskbar labels. Microsoft notoriously took a long time to re-implement taskbar labels in Windows 11, but even with an official implementation available, there's a good bit more you can do with this mod. Windows 11's default setting uses an adaptive length for the taskbar items that's made to fit the title of each window, but this mod lets you set a fixed width so that taskbar buttons have a consistent size. You can even do things like changing the font size for taskbar labels, too — it's really useful if you want to have full control over the experience.

That's just the beginning

A lot more mods are available

Beyond these options, I've checked out a couple of other very interesting options. One that I found very interesting is an option to close an app window by middle-clicking it on the taskbar, which is kind of the opposite of the default behavior, where you open a new instance of the app by doing that. In addition to that, this mod also makes it so that if you hold Control on the keyboard while middle-clicking, you end the task completely (as if you were using the Task Manager).

Another cool one enables browser tab scrolling for the most popular browsers (including Edge, Chrome, Brave, and Opera, currently). This simply makes it so that when you scroll over the tab bar in a browser, you easily cycle between your open tabs. In a sort of similar vein, another mod enables changing your system volume by scrolling over anywhere on your taskbar, making things that much easier.

Windhawk deserves your attention

I'm just really impressed by everything Windhawk is able to do while seemingly being a very lightweight app, and also a relatively obscure one at that. I had never heard of this app until just a few days ago, but I came away very impressed with everything it can do.

If anything, I'm excited to see what developments may come next if the app becomes more popular. I'd definitely like to see even more themes for the stylers, but knowing how inventive users are, I'd love to be surprised, too. If you haven't yet, check out Windhawk using the link below.