Desk Widgets
Lightweight desktop widgets for Windows. Native C# on the .NET Framework 4 that ships with every
Windows 10/11 PC, so there is nothing to install. All widgets run in one process: about 33 MB of
memory and about 0.3% of one CPU core with seven widgets on the desktop.
Website ·
Download ·
Community widgets ·
Contributing · Security
Install
Download DeskWidgets.exe from the latest release
and run it — it's a single file, no installer needed. It adds itself to the Start menu and
registers the deskwidgets:// protocol for one-click installs from the website.
An installer (DeskWidgets-Setup.exe) is also available in the release. It does the same
setup with a wizard and adds an uninstaller to Settings › Apps.
Windows SmartScreen may warn about an unsigned app the first time; choose More info › Run anyway,
or build it yourself from source (below).
The app checks for updates automatically and shows a dialog when a new version is available.
Build & run (any Windows PC)
git clone <this repo>
cd <repo>
build.bat
bin\DeskWidgets.exe
The first run adds Desk Widgets to the Start menu (it's recreated if missing, or if the exe it
pointed to was moved), so after that you can just search for it.
build.bat first runs tools\check-hidden.ps1, which refuses characters that can make code read
differently from how it runs (lone CR, U+2028, bidi and zero-width characters). To run the same
check before every commit, turn on the repo's hooks once per clone:
git config core.hooksPath .githooks
Widgets
The app ships with three built-in clock faces. Everything else — calendar, weather, system monitor,
and more — is published through the community gallery and installed from Explore. This keeps the
app small and lets widgets update independently.
Built-in
| Widget | Size | Notes |
|---|
| Analog Clock | Small | Local time, classic dial |
| Analog Clock · Dark | Small | Local time, dark dial |
| World Clock | Small | Any city (starts on Paris) |
Community (shipped by the owner, installed from Explore)
| Category | Widget | Size | Notes |
|---|
| Productivity | Calendar | Medium | Today, next events, the month; events from calendar subscription links (.ics) |
| Weather | Weather | Medium | Open-Meteo (free, no account); type a city once; °C or °F; refreshes every 15 min |
| Productivity | Focus Timer | Small | Start/pause/reset; keeps running across restarts |
| Productivity | Reminders | Medium | Click a circle to tick off, click elsewhere to add; can also list today's Calendar events |
| Productivity | Notes | Small | Click and type straight on it; first line is the title; click away or Esc to save |
| System | System | Small | CPU (1 min history), memory, disk; reads Windows directly every 2 s |
| Media | Photo Frame | Medium | Just the picture (no file name); animated GIFs play; changes hourly or on hover › next |
| Media | Now Playing | Medium | Whatever Windows is playing (Spotify, browsers, Media Player): art, progress, play/pause/skip |
| Developer | GitHub | Medium | Profile, streak, 30 weeks of contributions; refreshes every 30 min |
| Sports | F1 Hub | Medium | Next race, schedule, standings from the Jolpica F1 API |
| Sports | F1 Live Timing | Large | Session timing, gaps, track map from OpenF1 |
Users upgrading from an older version that had these as built-in are prompted to download them from
Explore; their settings are migrated automatically.
Card widgets follow Apple's widget specs (small 170 × 170 pt, medium 364 × 170 pt, large
364 × 382 pt, 16 pt margins, 22 pt corners) with Dark, Light and Vibrant appearances.
Vibrant shows your wallpaper blurred behind the widget with white content, like macOS desktop
widgets; it is sampled from a tiny cached copy of the wallpaper, so it costs nothing while idle (it
re-samples when you move the widget or change the wallpaper). The analog clocks have a Vibrant face
too. The design language is design/apple-design.md (section 17 covers this app);
design/essential-widgets.html is a mockup of the widgets.
Calendar events: right-click › Add a calendar, and paste the calendar's private iCal link
(Google: "Secret address in iCal format"; Outlook: Publish calendar; iCloud: public link). Links and
the cached events are stored encrypted with DPAPI. Repeating events (daily, weekly on chosen days,
monthly, yearly) and time zones are handled; unusual repeat rules may be missed.
Weather: click the widget and type a city. Its name is looked up once; after that only the
coordinates are sent to Open-Meteo.
GitHub sign-in: click the widget and either paste a personal access token (stored encrypted
with Windows DPAPI for your account only) or choose "Use my GitHub CLI login" if gh is installed.
Nothing is read until you choose. The last result is cached in %APPDATA%\DeskWidgets\cache, so the
widget shows instantly at startup and keeps working offline.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
