The Windows 10 Start menu, back on Windows 11.
Winly Start is a small, open-source (MIT) .NET 8 app that brings the Windows 10 Start menu experience to Windows 11 — the left rail, the A–Z app list with folders and the alphabet jump grid, live tiles and the tile board — while following your Windows 11 theme (light/dark, accent colour, transparency) and keeping the Windows 10 look.
It replaces the Windows 11 Start menu in everyday use: the Start button, the Windows key and Ctrl+Esc all open Winly Start. It does this without touching Windows itself — quit the app and Windows 11 is exactly as it was.
Download from the latest release:
| Download | What it is |
|---|---|
WinlyStart-Setup-x.y.z.exe |
Recommended. Per-user installer — no administrator rights, nothing needed on the machine. Adds Start-menu and optional desktop shortcuts, and can start Winly Start when you sign in. |
WinlyStart-win-x64-selfcontained.zip |
Portable single .exe. Needs nothing installed. |
WinlyStart-win-x64.zip |
Portable single .exe, needs the .NET 8 Desktop Runtime. |
After installing, a tray icon appears — press the Windows key. Right-click the tray icon for
Settings…. To uninstall: Windows Settings → Apps, or tray icon → Exit and delete the
folder. Your tiles and settings live in %LocalAppData%\WinlyStart and are left in place.
The familiar Windows 10 layout: a left rail, "Recently added" and "Most used", the A–Z list with expandable Start-menu folders, and a tile board with groups.
Type anywhere to search; press Enter to launch the first match.
Windows 11 removed the live-tile platform, so Winly Start provides its own faces for the things it has real data for: a Calendar tile showing your next note, a Clock tile, a Photos slideshow from your Pictures folder, and website tiles that show the site's own preview image. Each tile has a Turn Live Tile on/off switch in its right-click menu.
Drag tiles to rearrange them — the others glide out of the way. Resize between Small, Medium, Wide and Large, drag a tile below the board to start a new group, drag a group header to reorder groups, and click a group header to name it.
Right-click empty space on the tile board to add any program, file, shortcut or website. Websites use the site's favicon as their icon and its own preview image as a live tile, and anything you add can be renamed or re-pointed later with Edit….
Click the hamburger for the labelled rail. Choose which shortcuts appear — Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, Videos, Network, Personal folder, File Explorer, Settings and a Calendar — in Settings.
A three-month calendar with a note per day. Days with a note take their category colour,
and you can add, rename, recolour and delete categories. Notes import and export as JSON or
iCalendar (.ics). The window is resizable and remembers its size.
Winly Start never injects into explorer.exe, never patches files, never writes outside
HKCU. It uses three ordinary, revertible user-mode mechanisms:
- Windows key / Ctrl+Esc — a low-level keyboard hook. When you tap the Windows key, Winly Start lets the key through and sends a harmless masking key alongside it, so Windows sees a "Win + something" chord and does not open its own menu. Every Win+X shortcut keeps working natively.
- Start button — a low-level mouse hook that recognises a left-click on the taskbar's Start button (located through UI Automation, so it works with left- and centre-aligned taskbars). The menu opens where the Start button is.
- Fallback — if the Windows 11 menu still appears (touch gesture, or the Windows key pressed while an elevated app has focus, which hooks cannot see), Winly Start notices it and takes over; the Windows menu dismisses itself.
Closing Winly Start removes the hooks; Windows 11 is untouched.
Winly Start is written to stay small: plain WPF, no UI frameworks, no WinForms, icons loaded lazily at the exact sizes shown and frozen, a virtualised app list, live-tile timers that run only while the menu is open, and the working set is trimmed when the menu hides.
git clone https://github.com/Mahi-BD/WinlyStart
cd WinlyStart
dotnet build src/WinlyStart -c Release
dotnet publish src/WinlyStart -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained true -p:PublishSingleFile=true -o out/sc
Requires the .NET 8 SDK. The project sets EnableWindowsTargeting, so it also compiles
on Linux/macOS (handy for CI and reviews); it only runs on Windows 10/11. The installer is
built with Inno Setup from installer/WinlyStart.iss.
Developer notes, architecture and the project rules are in
Repo/Instruction/read.md.
- The menu opens on the primary monitor's taskbar; multi-monitor placement is on the roadmap.
- Acrylic renders as a solid tint on current Windows 11 builds — the old blur API no longer blurs, and real blur needs the DWM system-backdrop path.
- Website live tiles show the preview image a site publishes (
og:image), not a live browser render — embedding a browser engine would cost a large dependency and a lot of memory. - Pin to taskbar and jump lists are not available (no public API).
- While an elevated window has focus, the Windows key is handled by the fallback path (brief flicker of the Windows 11 menu). Winly Start deliberately does not run elevated.
Release binaries are built on a clean GitHub Actions runner from the tagged public commit, never
from a developer machine, and every executable and the installer are signed and then verified with
signtool verify /pa before the release is published. Who may author, review and approve a signing
request is set out in the
code signing policy.
Winly Start collects nothing — no telemetry, no analytics, no accounts. Everything stays in
%LocalAppData%\WinlyStart. The only network requests it ever makes are to a website you add as a
tile, to read that site's icon and preview image. See the privacy policy.
Issues and pull requests are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. The two rules that matter most: keep the code and the working set small, and never do anything that could harm the operating system.
MIT. Windows, Windows 10 and Windows 11 are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation; Winly Start is an independent project and is not affiliated with Microsoft.