Preview

Starling for Windows

The clean, fast Windows shell you’ve been waiting for.

It replaces your taskbar, Start menu, desktop and File Explorer. No bloatware, no ads, no waiting. Below: the same PC, the same clicks, filmed side by side against the originals.

Try it See the films

Start menu File manager Context menu

Pressing the Win key, head to head Win key pressed on both, played at 1/8 speed. Starling is done at 100 ms; Windows settles at 300 ms. Median of 20 opens each.

3×

Start menu

100 ms vs 300 ms

4×

Right-click menu

67 ms vs 267 ms

13.4×

File Explorer

83 ms vs 1116 ms

100 MB

Less memory

492 MB vs 595 MB

Same PC, twenty runs each. All of the numbers.

Ours is finished before theirs appears.

Right-click a folder

Frames 33 ms apart: Starling's menu is fully drawn at frame 2, 67 ms; Windows shows nothing until frame 7 at 233 ms and completes at frame 8, 267 ms.

Press the Win key

Frames 33 ms apart: Starling's Start menu is drawn at frame 3, 100 ms; Windows shows first pixels at frame 5 at 167 ms and settles at frame 9, 300 ms.

Press Win+E

Frames 33 ms apart: Starling's file manager is drawn at frame 3, 100 ms; Windows shows first pixels at frame 11 at 367 ms, and after a marked 21-frame gap of loading finishes its list at frame 34, 1133 ms.

Just a shell

Nothing in it is selling you anything.

No bloatware

No web search, no news feed, no widgets. Start reads what is installed on your PC — Windows keeps 209 MB of web hosts running for its own.

No ads

Nothing promoted, nothing suggested, nothing recommended. Your apps, in the order you put them.

Nothing running

When you are not using it, it does nothing — no background tasks, no battery drain. Open Task Manager and watch: it reads zero.

The shell

Everything you touch, replaced.

Taskbar, Start menu, desktop, tray, notifications and File Explorer. Your apps keep working — Store apps included — and if the shell ever fails, Windows' own desktop comes back on its own.

Not a controversial claim

Microsoft agrees Windows should be faster.

They promised “substantially lower latency for search, navigation and context menus” in March. Five months on, the menu in the film above still takes 300 ms.

The actual point

Built in a week.

All of it — with Claude Code. Windows was never slow because the problems are hard. It is slow because fixing them used to take months. It doesn't any more.

Get started

Try it, and how to get back out

Install 0.1.0

Windows 11 x64 · 39 MB · per user, no administrator

Download StarlingSetup-0.1.0.exe and double-click it. It installs into your profile, writes one per-user registry value, and takes effect when you sign out and back in — every other account keeps Explorer. The build is unsigned, so SmartScreen will ask once: More info → Run anyway. Checksum and notes: the release page.

Leave

Explorer returns at the next sign-in

powershell -File "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Programs\Starling\Uninstall.ps1"
# or just unregister, keeping the files:
WinShellBar.exe --unregister-shell

Build it yourself

Windows 10/11 x86_64 · Swift 6.2

The shell is one SwiftPM product in the open repository. The getting-started page walks the Windows toolchain setup; then:

sdk\tools\build-windows.ps1 -Product WinShellBar -Configuration release

A preview, developed and tested as a daily driver. Every number on this page has its raw capture in the repository.

GitHub Get started The terminal it ships with