A custom Windows Start Menu and taskbar replacement, built around a fullscreen, controller-first launcher grid — with a dual-pane file explorer, a download manager, and deep emulation tooling built in.
A fullscreen, Windows-8-Start-Screen-style grid of Apps, Web, and Games tiles — fully navigable by keyboard, mouse, or game controller.
Window list, clock, and battery (with per-device Bluetooth battery levels), reserving real desktop space like a normal taskbar.
Dual-pane, controller-navigable file management with archive extract/compress and disc-image tooling (CHD, Xbox ISO) built in.
Paste a link or magnet, resolved through Real-Debrid when configured, downloaded via a bundled multi-connection aria2 daemon.
190+ platforms mapped to RetroArch or the best standalone emulator for that system, each verified to launch in fullscreen, with one-click RetroAchievements login.
Scans Steam, Epic Games, and GOG Galaxy for already-installed games and adds tiles for them automatically.
Floating, click-through Clock, System Stats, Desktop Icons, and media (video/image) widgets you add from Settings — only available once your wallpaper is set to a video or image file.
PIN-locks tiles, widgets, and wallpaper/appearance editing, and blocks the power menu and exiting GridShell — hand the PC to a kid without worrying about things getting changed.
Just run GridShell.exe. It hides the real taskbar and takes over the Win key/Start button while running — closing it instantly restores normal Windows behavior.
Registers GridShell in place of explorer.exe at login, with a watchdog that relaunches it on crash and falls back to explorer.exe after repeated failures. Try this in a VM or secondary account before your main one.
Requires the .NET 10 SDK and Windows 10 (19041+) or Windows 11.
git clone https://github.com/theskysanctum/GridShell.git
cd GridShell
dotnet build GridShell.slnx