A Windows Start-menu replacement written in C# / Avalonia. Ships five built-in looks — Windows 11 (the default), Modern (Windows 7), Linux Mint Cinnamon, Classic XP and Classic 9x — rendered on top of modern Windows shell metadata (localized labels, account picture, taskbar pins, Start mirror, JumpLists) rather than reinventing them.
See every theme in light & dark →
Tip
Press Shift+Win to toggle the menu.
MenYou is built to be usable the moment you sign in — it autostarts via a logon-triggered scheduled task that sidesteps Windows' Run-key startup throttle. See docs/OPTIMIZATION.md for the startup/performance engineering (and the ~15 s → ~1 s cold-start story).
This started with a debloated Windows 11 (Tiny11). Stripping the image also strips out whatever Start-menu search uses to find local apps — apparently locating Notepad on your own PC routes through Edge. With search broken, I needed a new Start menu. Open-Shell was the one solid free/OSS option, but none of its skins did it for me. I tried theming it, went down the rabbit hole of how it works, and concluded I wanted something more flexible on a well-known stack. MenYou is the result: a ground-up-skinnable Start menu on .NET 10 + Avalonia 12.
| Channel | Command |
|---|---|
| GitHub Releases | Latest release — download MenYou-Setup-<version>.exe |
| winget | coming soon |
| Chocolatey | coming soon |
The GitHub release carries an x64 build and a native Windows-on-ARM one, both self-contained — ~122 MB installed (~41 MB download), no prerequisite, the .NET runtime is bundled. winget and Chocolatey install the x64 build.
A third, framework-dependent installer (MenYou-fd-Setup) shipped through 0.9.19 at ~50 MB installed. It was retired because the smaller download only looked smaller — it required a ~55 MB .NET runtime, and its cold start measured about the same unless another .NET 10 app already kept the shared runtime warm at logon. Existing installs migrate themselves to the self-contained build on the next update check.
Windows Defender may flag the installer as
Trojan:Win32/Wacatac.B!ml. It is a false positive. MenYou replaces the Start menu, so it installs global keyboard and mouse hooks, maps a small helper DLL into Explorer to intercept the Win key, and registers itself to start with Windows. That combination — in an unsigned binary that every release gives a brand-new hash — is what generic ML classifiers are trained to catch, andWacatacis the bucket they use for it. Nothing in the download is malicious: the installer and its entire payload scan clean locally; the verdict is a cloud reputation call made at download time. Verify the published SHA-256, then choose More info → Run anyway, or build from source. It will keep recurring until the binaries are code-signed — seeCLAUDE.mdfor the full investigation. Seedocs/OPTIMIZATION.md.
The installer is built with Inno Setup — a standard setup wizard where you can override the install location, Start-Menu folder, and shortcuts (per-user by default, with a per-machine option). Updates are checked in-app against GitHub Releases: Settings → Sprawdź aktualizacje downloads the latest installer and runs it to upgrade in place — and a leftover framework-dependent install is migrated to the self-contained build. Code-signing status (SignPath Foundation when available, otherwise unsigned) is noted in the release body — see docs/AUTOMATION.md for the deployment pipeline.
# Requires the .NET 10 SDK. The project targets net10.0-windows.
dotnet build src/MenYou/MenYou.csproj
# Run
src/MenYou/bin/Debug/net10.0-windows/MenYou.exeThe native input bridge under src/MenYou.Bridge/ is compiled by tools/build-bridge.ps1 as a pre-build step. It's optional — if MSVC isn't installed the script exits 0 and MenYou falls back to the managed WinEvent monitor at runtime.
Press Shift+Win to toggle the menu.
MenYou is partly translated for free: every system label ("Settings", "Pinned", "Apply", "Sign out", …) pulls live from the Windows shell DLLs, so it reads in your locale automatically. The MenYou-specific strings ("Mirror Windows Start pins", the update-check statuses, etc.) live in src/MenYou/Languages/*.json and need humans.
The easiest way to help is Crowdin — pick your language and edit right in the browser: no account hassle, nothing to clone, and you only touch the strings you want. You don't have to finish a whole language; fixing even a handful of awkward or still-English lines genuinely helps. Once a month an automated sync pulls the completed translations back into the repo, so your changes ride along in the next release.
Prefer to work in git? Edit src/MenYou/Languages/<lang>.json directly — keep the existing keys, just change the values — and open a PR. It runs through the same sync and ships the same way, so either route gets you to the same place.
The Settings dialog has a Custom tab that loads a self-contained AXAML file, parses it through AvaloniaRuntimeXamlLoader on every keystroke, and renders the result in a live preview pane next to the editor. Loaded files are copied into %AppData%\MenYou\CustomThemes\ so they survive uninstalls; the Save button re-exports the current editor content to a path of your choice.
Three worked examples live in samples/custom-themes/: Windows7Square.axaml is the Modern (Windows 7) layout with every corner squared off, a compact illustration of re-skinning by overriding styles; ClassicXpBlue.axaml and Classic9xBlue.axaml keep the Classic XP / 9x layouts with their original blue account header, which the built-in versions no longer use. Load one from Settings → Custom → Load… and edit live. See docs/THEMING.md for the authoring constraints (no x:Class, no compiled bindings, and what chrome the window gives a custom theme vs what the theme draws itself).
The Windows 11 and Linux Mint Cinnamon looks that used to ship as custom-theme samples are now built-in styles — pick them (alongside Modern (Windows 7), Classic XP and Classic 9x) from Settings → Appearance.
docs/OVERVIEW.md— architecture, tech stack, how it works.docs/OPTIMIZATION.md— startup/performance engineering: the cold-start work, measurements, and what changed each release.docs/SEARCH.md— how search works and ranks results, how the real Windows Start menu and Open-Shell rank theirs, and the planned ranking overhaul.docs/AUTOMATION.md— CI/CD map, code-signing options, required secrets, and the release pipeline.docs/THEMING.md— authoring custom themes for the Settings → Custom feature.CREDITS.md— inspirations, third-party code, and asset attributions.CHANGELOG.md— versioned change log (auto-generated by release-please from Conventional Commits).CONTRIBUTING.md— building, layout, PR flow.
MIT © Alpaq and MenYou contributors.
Inspirations and third-party attributions (including the app icon) are collected in CREDITS.md.