I couldn't come with a creative title for sorry!

today I wanna complete my journey trying to make a custom setup and workflow for my windows system.. the first post was "were we unfair with windows", you can search for it in the blog.

I made more advanced things the last 2 days, first of all, I installed glazewm tiling window manager which is really fast and feature-rich and lightweight, really recommend it but you'll need some time to get used to it if you have never worked with tiling window managers such as me!

I also downloaded gcc from scoop and pwsh (powershell core) from winget, I set pwsh as the default profile in windows terminal (via settings.json) and it's way better than cmd.exe, I feel it's a bit faster and cleaner, with auto-completion and UNIX commands I got from git bash, I feel like I'm using linux, further more with gcc and make I can compile projects meant for linux on windows if they just use standard C and gcc-specific features!

I also made some customizations in my pwsh profile, which is a script typically stored in Documents\PowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_script.ps1.. it's similar to .bashrc in bash shell!

if you use spotify web version and installed glazewm you'll probably face the problem of glazewm treating spotify overlay (the small overlay that appears when you leave spotify tab while some media is playing)  as a normal window and tiling it!
this is so ugly and takes much space, I fixed this by adding this rule to ignore that overlay in glazewm configs (typically found in C:\Users\<user_name>\.glzr\glazewm\config.yaml):

      - window_title: { regex: '[Pp]icture.in.[Pp]icture|^(.+?)\s?•\s?(.+)$' } <--- the second part of this rule after | symbol

        window_class: { regex: 'Chrome_WidgetWin_1|MozillaDialogClass' }

you'll find the first part of the rule along with other rules in window_rule: section, you just need to add "|^(.+?)\s?•\s?(.+)$" to window_title (it should be a regex rule not equals or anything else)!

I used "buttery taskbar 2" tool to hide the taskbar because I installed zebar tool which makes very beautiful status bars and integrates well with glazewm!

I made some other minor changes such as registry edits but I don't remember them all.. I also ran psexec -i -s cmd.exe to run the cmd shell as SYSTEM user and played around a bit with windows, deleted some files I felt unnecessary, etc.. but I don't recommend doing so as I was about to break my system!

after all these changes, my brother saw my system and thought I'm running on linux not windows!
without the windows icon in the top left, I'm sure no one would think it's windows at all:

in the next time, I think I'll focus on debloating the system and possibly the kernel if possible, I'll leave the GUI and beauty a bit and focus on performance, RAM and disk usage, removing all tools that doesn't suit me, etc..

an important note: glazewm will not be the fastest and I think this is because it works upon explorer.exe and dwm.exe, the shell and window manager of windows, so it's limited and restricted by what they provide, in linux-oriented TWMs such as dwm (by suckless), the TWM has more freedom since linux doesn't has a built-in WM, I'm thinking in how to solve it and I'll experiment a bit with cairo shell (a custom shell to replace explorer.exe) and I wish I reach something stable and efficient!