A basic variety of the hand winch that you will find in your research is the mechanism that applies mechanical force, i.e. the part you handle to make the tool work.
There are hand winches that use levers, which are nothing more than rods around 50 cm long, with grips on their end. To "operate" them, you must push and pull repeatedly.
The other mechanism is the good old crank, which needs no introduction, but has smaller dimensions than the lever rod. There are models of various characteristics, but the manual crank winches tend to have a smaller capacity.