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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!
>I doubt that people think it's the engineering teams that are the problem
Did you forget Microsoft engineering response to Casey Muratori "Extremely slow performance when processing virtual terminal sequences"?
"I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation as “extremely simple” somewhat combatively."
https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomm...
followed by Casey producing evidence for his 'extremely simple' claim in couple of days.
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SaaSHub
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ImHex
🔍 A Hex Editor for Reverse Engineers, Programmers and people who value their retinas when working at 3 AM.
ImHex (https://imhex.werwolv.net/) is also a really nice Hex editor with tons of plugins (patterns, file support, etc.) and even an embedded language for adding more patterns easily
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x64dbg
An open-source user mode debugger for Windows. Optimized for reverse engineering and malware analysis.
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I tried 3 options, for converting a DWG to a DXF -- FreeCAD, CloudConvert and LibreDWG, and I will be talking about how all 3 options failed for me.
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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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Project mention: Notepad++ Zero-Click RCE via Path Traversal (CVE-2026-52884) | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-06-10
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keepassxc
KeePassXC is a cross-platform community-driven port of the Windows application “KeePass Password Safe”.
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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).
Project mention: Conquering Windows Server 2022: How to Manually Sideload Winget (Without the Microsoft Store) | dev.to | 2026-05-10Navigate to the official Winget releases page: Github winget releases
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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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Project mention: OpenRCT2 v0.5.1 "Swamp Castle" released Last version to support Windows 7 | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-30
You can follow the link to the cask code on GitHUb and the line disabling will (usually) leave a clear reason. In this case, because of Gatekeeper/codesigning because that costs money https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2/issues/15879?utm_source...
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DearPyGui
Dear PyGui: A fast and powerful Graphical User Interface Toolkit for Python with minimal dependencies
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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, Axera NPU, Ascend NPU, x86_64 servers, websocket server/client, support 12 programming languages
The assistant button opens a turn-based voice loop (speech to text, then VAD, then Gemma 4, then text to speech) that stays local by default. The built-in voice recognition and TTS on phones are fast but flat and robotic, so Aide ships a real choice of voices instead: roughly 23 Piper, Kokoro, MeloTTS, and Matcha voices for output and a stack of Zipformer, Whisper, Moonshine, Parakeet, SenseVoice, and GigaAM models for input. The whole voice toolkit runs on Sherpa-ONNX, which gives Aide one fast, on-device runtime for STT, TTS, and VAD across all of those models, so none of your audio has to leave the phone to be heard or spoken back.
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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++.
This reminds me of OpenFrameworks [0], which provides very similar framework style functionality like Nannou but for C++.
[0]: https://openframeworks.cc/
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Project mention: Show HN: FluidCAD – Parametric CAD with JavaScript | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-04-10
I'll throw my hat in on the feedback... looks great!
https://github.com/openscad/openscad/pull/4478#issuecomment-...
My pet use case is: "My naive approach as a programmer would be: `pen := new Pen(q,r,s,t); box := new Box( pen.L, pen.W, pen.H )`" along with being able to sometimes work with the whole pen, and sometimes touch the pen vs. the cap separately.
Since it's all javascript, it seems like there's a chance that this use case would work (ie: `p = Pen(...).render().getWidth()`)? Additionally, your intermediate step screenshots really makes it seem like a SketchUp-ish GUI would be perfect! Obviously a ton of work, but SketchUp's "grab face + extrude / push", but if it were "sticky" to the underlying parametric components seems like it'd be an awesome combo... something like group/components, but backed by code instead of GUI-only (or GUI-centric) editing.
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Project mention: Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-06-15
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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.
Project mention: WinMerge 2.16.56.2 – A Windows tool for visual difference display and merging | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-28
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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Bitwarden Vs 1Password Security Audit 2025
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Notepad++ Zero-Click RCE via Path Traversal (CVE-2026-52884)
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Windows GOG DOS Games on M-Series Macs
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WinMerge 2.16.56.2 – A Windows tool for visual difference display and merging
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WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward
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WinMerge 2.16.56 – A Windows tool for visual difference display and merging
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Conquering Windows Server 2022: How to Manually Sideload Winget (Without the Microsoft Store)
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 17 Jun 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source Window projects in C++? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Windows Terminal | 103,557 |
| 2 | ImHex | 53,859 |
| 3 | x64dbg | 48,621 |
| 4 | FreeCAD | 31,481 |
| 5 | shadPS4 | 31,370 |
| 6 | calculator | 30,955 |
| 7 | notepad-plus-plus | 28,366 |
| 8 | keepassxc | 27,637 |
| 9 | winget-cli | 26,046 |
| 10 | TranslucentTB | 19,686 |
| 11 | Cocos2d | 18,998 |
| 12 | MMKV | 18,618 |
| 13 | OpenRCT2 | 15,841 |
| 14 | DearPyGui | 15,469 |
| 15 | sherpa-onnx | 12,958 |
| 16 | AutoHotkey | 12,557 |
| 17 | OpenFrameworks | 10,388 |
| 18 | openscad | 9,558 |
| 19 | multipass | 9,140 |
| 20 | ConEmu | 9,080 |
| 21 | Open-Shell-Menu | 9,074 |
| 22 | olive | 9,040 |
| 23 | winmerge | 8,886 |
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