I'll come back to this a little bit tomorrow. Glad it runs but now it's just stuck at loading the Jinja2 templates nothing I do gets it to run beyond that point.

my goal is to hopefully refactor searx a bit while I go about adding support to windows.

Thank you for your commitment, but unfortunately, I have to inform you MS-Windows is not in the scope of this project

The SearXNG project is based on the concepts of open source and user privacy.

Microsoft's recent and past history has been characterized by its efforts to combat these very concepts.

.. company's potential approaches to stopping open source momentum. One strategy was "embrace-extend-extinguish", in which Microsoft would adopt standard technology, add proprietary extensions, and upon establishing a customer base, would lock consumers into the proprietary extension to assert a monopoly of the space. The memos also acknowledged open source as a methodology capable of meeting or exceeding proprietary development methodology. Microsoft downplayed these memos as the opinions of an individual employee and not Microsoft's official position [1]

But even if we ignore these aspects, once we support MS Windows, we face several problems that do not exist in the Linux/Unix world, including porting the developer environment and quality assurance.

We might consider taking on these efforts (some of which are already evident in this PR), but we would only encourage people to stick with their decision to use MS Windows ...

This change will allow windows users to host searxng servers of their own locally

Let's be clear: MS Windows is anything but a server operating system.

Ultimately, however, it is everyone's own decision as to which operating system they choose... and even for MS Windows, a solution is available with the Docker image.