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Top 23 C++ Window Projects
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Windows Terminal
The new Windows Terminal and the original Windows console host, all in the same place!
Y'know, I spent a week investigating doing something similar with the Windows Terminal about 18 months ago: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/16495#issuecomm...
There's even more under the "Updates archive" expando in that post.
It was a pretty compelling prototype. But after I played with Polyglot Notebooks[1], I pretty much just abandoned that experiment. There's a _lot_ of UI that needs to be written to build a notebook-like experience. But the Polyglot notebooks took care of that by just converting the commandline backend to a jupyter kernel.
I've been writing more and more script-like experiments in those ever since. Just seems so much more natural to have a big-ol doc full of notes, that just so happens to also have play buttons to Do The Thing.
[1]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotne...
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Stream
Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video. Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
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ImHex
🔍 A Hex Editor for Reverse Engineers, Programmers and people who value their retinas when working at 3 AM.
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x64dbg
An open-source user mode debugger for Windows. Optimized for reverse engineering and malware analysis.
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It's probably very hardware dependent now, just like it was back then. My calculator opens to interactive in much less than 1 second, but I've got a 9800x3d and fast memory and nvme drive. The other guy saying his start menu takes 8 seconds to open probably has a pretty shit computer.
I definitely got the stupid hourglass in win 95 when trying to open anything, but my understanding of computers at the time was that black ones were faster than beige ones, so my computer was probably shit.
I tried to look up calculator win 95 vids on YouTube, there are a couple. One gets an hourglass - but less than a second, one is instant, one shows the calculator crashing lol.
During this I also found out that Microsoft Calculator is open source: https://github.com/microsoft/calculator
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Related: I've posted similarly recently, but I wanted to share again how much improved I've recently found FreeCAD. I'm self-taught with CAD, and have repeatedly tried and discarded FreeCAD for several years. I've frequently recommended against FreeCAD here and elsewhere based on my bad experienced.
However, after finding a video [0] in which someone successfully --and without difficulty-- passed a Solidworks professional certification using FreeCAD, I gave it another go.
I've since been trialling FreeCAD via the 'bleeding edge' weekly development builds [1]. It's not perfect, and some functions are still very unintuitive, but within boundaries, it's now super-usable for relatively complex hobbyist-level CAD. In some areas, it's actually better than the competition I've tried, IMO - for example making and cutting threads.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEfNRST_3x8
[1] https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/releases
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Looks like it's a vulnerability in the installer.
From a small bit of skimming, sounds like it's a user escalation vector, where a low privileged user can run the installer in a contrived manner to achieve privilege escalation.
https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/secur...
So for my personal install, nothing to worry about here...
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InfluxDB
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
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keepassxc
KeePassXC is a cross-platform community-driven port of the Windows application “KeePass Password Safe”.
> Care to cite this statement?
Yes, literally from you: "Passkeys should never be allowed to be exported in clear text." https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407 Also, "You absolutely should be preventing users from being able to copy a private key!"
> You can use any credential manager you choose. You don't have to use Apple Passwords / iCloud Keychain.
But I want to use Apple Passwords.
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winget-cli
WinGet is the Windows Package Manager. This project includes a CLI (Command Line Interface), PowerShell modules, and a COM (Component Object Model) API (Application Programming Interface).
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Cocos2d
Cocos2d-x is a suite of open-source, cross-platform, game-development tools utilized by millions of developers across the globe. Its core has evolved to serve as the foundation for Cocos Creator 1.x & 2.x.
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MMKV
An efficient, small mobile key-value storage framework developed by WeChat. Works on Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, POSIX, and OHOS.
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DearPyGui
Dear PyGui: A fast and powerful Graphical User Interface Toolkit for Python with minimal dependencies
Project mention: Show HN: Scripton – Python IDE with Built-In Realtime Visualizations | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-02-18Looks beautiful so congratulation for the launch.
Not sure if today this is enough though without any kind of AI chat assistant. Trae [0] is based on VSCode and Jetbrains Fleet are good looking as well. Visualization is definitely a big plus but there is also alternative like using rerun [1] and dearpygui [2] or some VSCode plugins (Python Image Preview, AREPL for Python)- might be hard to compete with those free alternatives on a subscription model IMHO but good luck!
[0] https://trae.ai/
[1] https://www.rerun.io/
[2] https://github.com/hoffstadt/DearPyGui
- Project mention: Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-12-03
- Project mention: I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-08-11
One useful addition for text file users: on Windows, create hotkey\macro timestamps using something like Autohotkey (https://autohotkey.com/)
3 letter hotkeys seem to work well - long enough to be unique without overlapping real words.
for instance, when I type ddd it automatically stamps this:
20250811 10:57 AM
then I type my note and can look back at what time\date it was.
sometimes I just need the date so that is dds (date-date-short) which gives
20250811
occasionally I just want the time so that's ttt
11:02:02 AM
I have many other 3 letter codes using Autohotkey to bring in frequently typed things too, useful in emails and such.
Since I think through typing, autohotkey has been a QoL helper.
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OpenFrameworks
openFrameworks is a community-developed cross platform toolkit for creative coding in C++.
Project mention: Ask HN: Who Are Your Favorite Photography and Generative Coding Artists? | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-02-26 -
sherpa-onnx
Speech-to-text, text-to-speech, speaker diarization, speech enhancement, source separation, and VAD using next-gen Kaldi with onnxruntime without Internet connection. Support embedded systems, Android, iOS, HarmonyOS, Raspberry Pi, RISC-V, RK NPU, Ascend NPU, x86_64 servers, websocket server/client, support 12 programming languages
There are many streaming ASR models based on CTC or RNNT. Look for example at sherpa (https://github.com/k2-fsa/sherpa-onnx), which can run streaming ASR, VAD, diarization, and many more.
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- Project mention: Windows 7 marketshare jumps to nearly 10% as Windows 10 support ends | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-10-02
I use a few utilities to tame Windows 11 and make it work more like Windows 7, 8, and 10. It should get rid of that "Remind me again" thing, I haven't seen it in a long, long time.
https://pxc-coding.com/donotspy11/
https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu/releases
https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/releases
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winmerge
WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle.
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
NOTE: The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars. The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
C++ Windows discussion
C++ Windows related posts
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Isn't WSL2 just a VM?
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KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support
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We Forked Chromium
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Shader Glass
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Windows package manager is down
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What Happened to Running What You Wanted on Your Own Machine?
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The IDEs we had 30 years ago ... and we lost
- A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub www.saashub.com | 23 Dec 2025
Index
What are some of the best open-source Window projects in C++? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Windows Terminal | 101,132 |
| 2 | ImHex | 52,046 |
| 3 | x64dbg | 47,354 |
| 4 | calculator | 30,798 |
| 5 | FreeCAD | 27,531 |
| 6 | shadPS4 | 27,243 |
| 7 | notepad-plus-plus | 26,514 |
| 8 | keepassxc | 25,222 |
| 9 | winget-cli | 25,131 |
| 10 | Cocos2d | 18,869 |
| 11 | TranslucentTB | 18,521 |
| 12 | MMKV | 18,373 |
| 13 | DearPyGui | 15,028 |
| 14 | OpenRCT2 | 14,925 |
| 15 | AutoHotkey | 11,622 |
| 16 | OpenFrameworks | 10,277 |
| 17 | sherpa-onnx | 9,371 |
| 18 | ConEmu | 9,013 |
| 19 | olive | 8,851 |
| 20 | multipass | 8,826 |
| 21 | openscad | 8,601 |
| 22 | Open-Shell-Menu | 8,413 |
| 23 | winmerge | 8,273 |
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