wispy

Your Windows taskbar, as a phone-style home bar. A thin pill that rises to meet your cursor, opens into a dock, and holds search, quick settings and notifications.

Also: your pinned apps, in your Windows order · running apps with dots · drag to reorder · a window picker for apps with several windows · right-click menus like the taskbar's (close, end task, run as administrator, pin) · hidden-icons menu · input language switcher · Task view and Show desktop · power menu · no telemetry.

Install

Download wispy-setup.exe from the latest release (or from the website) and run it. No admin rights needed.

Windows may say the app is unrecognised, because wispy isn't code-signed yet: choose More info, then Run anyway. Its code is all here, and the helper is a few readable C# files (helper/).

On first run wispy hides the Windows taskbar and takes over. Quit it from the right-click menu and the taskbar comes back, exactly as it was.

Requires Windows 11 (built and tested there; Windows 10 is untested).

Use it

Do this	To get
Move toward the bottom edge	A pill fades in and leans toward your cursor
Touch the bottom edge	The dock opens, with search, status and the clock below it
Win	Open wispy with search ready (tap again to close). Set it to open Start instead in Settings
Enter · Ctrl Shift Enter	Open the result · run it as administrator
Click an app with several windows	Pick the window
Drag a pinned app	Reorder the dock
Right-click anything	The menu you'd expect there. Right-click empty bar for wispy settings
Esc	Close

Make it yours

Right-click the empty bar and choose wispy settings. Everything saves as you change it, and Restore defaults is one click. Settings live in %APPDATA%\wispy\config.json.

• One window, mostly invisible. An Electron window sits at the bottom centre of your screen, transparent and click-through everywhere except the pieces you can see, so it never blocks the apps underneath.
• A native helper does what a web page can't. A small C# program, built with the compiler that ships with Windows, hides the real taskbar, listens for the Windows key, lists your windows, extracts high-resolution icons, switches sound outputs and keyboard languages, relays tray icons, and talks to the Bluetooth audio driver. The two halves talk over JSON lines.
• Two cursor zones, spring physics. The pill, the dock and every panel move on springs, so interruptions look natural instead of snapping.
• Your taskbar, read honestly. Pins come from the same places Windows keeps them, in the order the taskbar shows. wispy's own pin changes are layered on top and never touch Windows' list.
• Notifications are read from the notification database Windows already keeps, shown by wispy, and Windows' own banners are muted per app while it runs (restored when you quit).
• Hidden icons. wispy registers its own tray window, forwards every message to Explorer's real one unchanged, and relays your clicks, so nothing is lost if you quit.

wispy puts the taskbar back whenever it exits, and when its window crashes. The one case it can't cover is both of its processes being force-killed at the same instant (some "end task" tools do that). If the taskbar is ever missing, run restore-taskbar.ps1 (it's next to the installed app, in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\wispy), or restart Windows Explorer from Task Manager. A crash log is kept at %APPDATA%\wispy\wispy.log.

Uninstall: Settings, Apps, Installed apps, wispy. It offers to delete your settings too.

No analytics, accounts or servers. Everything stays on your PC. The only time wispy touches the internet is when you pick a web search, which opens your browser. Your notification list is stored locally and clears itself at the end of the day.

• Modern Store apps that live inside Windows' app frame (Settings, Calculator) don't show as running dots yet.
• Task view, Show desktop and the multi-monitor modes send the same keys and use the same display information Windows does, but have had less testing than the rest.
• Bluetooth Connect works for audio devices (headphones, speakers). Phones and controllers show their status only, because Windows offers no way to connect them from another app.
• Not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen will ask once.

Needs Windows, Node 22+, and the .NET Framework 4 compiler that ships with Windows (nothing to install).

npm install
npm run helper    # build the native helper
npm start         # run from source
npm test          # fast checks: syntax, ids, IPC, settings
npm run pack      # package the app into dist/
npm run installer # build the release installer (needs Inno Setup 6)
npm run art       # re-render this README's art

The UI can be developed in any browser: serve renderer/ and open it, and renderer/mock.js stands in for Electron. docs/ideas.md has the reasoning behind the settings.

The sky behind the screenshots is a small cloud shader in scripts/art (a ShaderGradient backdrop is one option away). Thanks to Electron for the window, and Geist (OFL) for the banner's type. The app icons in the screenshots are drawn for this repo. MIT licensed.