I never thought I’d be the kind of person to rip out Windows Explorer and replace it with something completely different. But after years of watching my desktop environment chug along, consuming hundreds of megabytes of RAM just to display a taskbar and a start menu, I finally snapped. Sure, you can make Windows Explorer better with free tools, but they don’t fix the core problem.
Being able to change the desktop environments easily on my Linux machines always made me wonder whether there would be a competent Windows equivalent. Well, I’m happy to report that there is one, and it’s much faster than Windows Explorer.
What a shell replacement actually does (and why it matters)
It’s not just a theme—it’s your entire desktop experience
If you’ve used Windows your whole life, chances are you’ve not even heard the term shell replacement. In the case of Windows, when I say “shell”, I’m not talking about PowerShell, Command Prompt, or the Windows Terminal. In Windows, the “shell” refers to explorer.exe—the entire graphical interface you interact with. Your taskbar, start menu, desktop icons, and file explorer windows—all of it is handled by that single process.
Most people never think about it, but Explorer is absolutely massive. It’s been accumulating features, bloat, and technical debt since Windows 95. Every animation, every context menu option, every integration with legacy systems adds weight. And while modern PCs can handle it just fine, there’s always a way to do it better.
Enter Shelled. As you can guess, it’s a Windows shell replacement that aims to fully replace explorer.exe as the system shell, while keeping the UI layer purely based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for easy customization.
- OS
-
Windows
- Developer
-
crosschainer
- Price model
-
Free, Open-source
Shelled is a Windows shell replacement that aims to fully replace `explorer.exe` as the system shell, while keeping the UI layer purely HTML/CSS/JS for easy customization.
Why I ditched Explorer for Shelled
Faster startup, fewer background processes, zero nostalgia
Unlike traditional shell replacements like Cairo Shell or Open-Shell that are built with native Windows APIs and compiled C++ code, Shelled’s entire user interface is written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, the same languages you use to build websites.
This might sound insane at first, but think about it: modern web rendering engines are incredibly optimized. Chromium and its derivatives have had billions of dollars poured into making web content render smoothly at 60 fps. Why not leverage that for desktop interfaces as well?
Apart from the speed, this approach makes customization extremely easy. If you can edit a CSS file, you can theme your entire desktop. Want to change the taskbar color? Edit a hex value. Want to redesign the entire start menu layout? Modify some basic HTML. No recompiling, no binary patching, no deep Windows internal knowledge required.
According to the official GitHub repository, the goal is to give Windows the same kind of separation between the core and visual interface that you get on Linux. There’s a small, testable core that talks to the OS, and a flexible HTML, CSS, and JavaScript environment that controls everything you see and interact with.
Installing a shell replacement is not beginner-friendly
Backups are mandatory, and rollback plans are non-negotiable
Shelled is in a very early experimental stage, which means installation isn’t going to be easy, and it’s not recommended that you swap it with Windows Explorer as your main shell just yet. Instead, the developer has provided an easy, non-destructive way to install and test Shelled on top of Windows Explorer.
This is experimental software. Back up your data. Create restore points. Be prepared to troubleshoot.
- Download the latest Shelled Release from the official GitHub repository.
- Extract the downloaded ZIP file and ensure you have the myshell-bootstrap.exe file present.
- Open PowerShell in the extracted directory and run the following command.
$env:SHELL_DEV_MODE = "1"
.\myshell-bootstrap.exe
And that’s it. You should see a full-screen desktop appear with Shelled’s taskbar launcher and workspace strip. Explorer is still running underneath, so you can either:
- Use Alt+Tab to switch back to other windows
- Close the myshell-bootstrap.exe console window to exit Shelled.
This is the safest way to see whether you like Shelled without changing how Windows starts.
If you want to run Shelled as your real shell, you’re going to have to edit the Windows Registry. Specifically, you need to modify the following registry key and change the Shell value from explorer.exe to point to Shelled’s executable.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
Before you do this, make sure you create a separate user account for the experiment as well as a system restore point for easy recovery. You can boot Windows in safe mode and revert the registry changes, but it’s better to have a backup plan.
The speed difference is impossible to ignore
Instant launches, lower RAM usage, and no Explorer baggage
The difference in startup speed compared to Explorer was immediately noticeable. Where Explorer typically takes 5 to 10 seconds to fully load all its components on my system, even with an NVMe SSD, Shelled was ready to go almost instantly.
This makes sense when you consider what Explorer has to initialize: thumbnail caches, shell extensions, network discovery services, Windows Search Indexer integration, and countless other background processes. Shelled, by contrast, only loads what it absolutely needs to display the user interface. It’s lean by design.
Your RAM usage will also see a drop. On my Windows 11 installation, Explorer typically sits between 150-250 MB of RAM usage, even when I’m not actively using it. That might not sound like a lot on a modern system with 16GB RAM, but it adds up, especially when you consider all the associated processes that hook into Explorer.
With Shelled running as my main shell, the processes hover around the 100MB mark. For users on older hardware, budget laptops, or anyone running resource-intensive applications where every megabyte counts, this is a massive win in terms of user experience and system response. Do keep in mind that you might not see these memory benefits if you’re running Shelled on top of Windows Explorer, but it should give you an idea of how you like using Shelled.
Despite being an experimental project, I haven’t yet faced any crashes, memory leaks, stuttering, or performance issues. Shelled has been keeping up with my daily workload, which has dozens of browser tabs, code editors, and other applications in the background without issues, but your mileage may vary.
The trade-offs are very real
Compatibility issues, missing features, and rough edges
Just because Shelled is insanely fast and customizable doesn’t mean you can replace it with Windows Explorer today. At the time of writing, the current 0.1.0 version doesn’t seem to support file thumbnails in the taskbar, Windows Search integration, OneDrive status indicators, or System tray management.
But Windows Search is terrible, and I don’t use OneDrive, so I don’t miss these features. But your experience might be different. Additionally, if you rely on File Explorer’s network drive management, integrated cloud storage, or advanced preview capabilities, Shelled might feel limiting.
Why this might be the future of Windows desktops
Lightweight shells could finally fix Windows’ performance problem
If you’re deeply integrated into Microsoft’s ecosystems and use every Windows 11 feature, stick with Explorer. But if you’re running older hardware, love customizing every system aspect, value performance over features, or enjoy troubleshooting tech, Shelled is worth exploring.
I changed one registry value and my Windows PC feels instantly faster
This registry change fixed the sluggishness I’d learned to tolerate.
Shelled proves web technologies can handle system-level UI responsibilities without sacrificing performance. As Progressive Web Apps blur the line between native and web applications, and native Windows apps continue to disappear, Shelled points to a future where desktop environments are as customizable as websites.
I will continue to miss native applications that are optimized for specific operating systems. But Shelled’s implementation shows that sometimes less really is more, and in this case, it’s also insanely fast.
