I got tired of sketchy Windows hooks, so I made my own
Hooking on Windows is one of those things that looks easy until it randomly crashes your process.
I kept running into the same issues: threads executing half patched code, weird instruction layouts breaking inline hooks, and edge cases most libraries just ignore.
So I built ZenWinHook.
Why I made it
Libraries like MinHook and PolyHook 2 are great, but they don’t really try to handle everything.
The biggest pain for me was patching safely while multiple threads are running, that’s where things usually fall apart.
What it does
ZenWinHook is a small C++ library that focuses on doing hooks properly.
It handles thread safe patching so you don’t get torn instructions.
Inline hooks actually parse and relocate instructions instead of guessing.
There are multiple hook types, so you don’t have to mix libraries.
And everything is RAII based so cleanup just happens automatically
When it’s useful
I mainly built this for:
- debugging
- instrumentation
- reverse engineering
- anything where stability actually matters
That’s it
If you’ve ever had hooks randomly crash a process, you’ll probably get why this exists.