👉 installer download for the latest release
A themable desktop widget overlay for Windows.
Put system meters (CPU, per-core, GPU/VRAM, memory, network), clocks, and the currently-playing track on a transparent, click-through overlay across all your monitors and arrange them with a built-in visual editor. Widgets follow a sensor + meter model but the layout is a live CSS-flow editor, styling is plain CSS + design tokens, and it ships with Home Assistant, MQTT, and stock-quote integrations.
See: widget reference · templating & formulas · theming
The screenshots regenerate from the registry: npm run gen:gallery (in client/); both reference
docs regenerate from the code with npm run gen:docs.
- Widgets: gauges, bars, sparklines, text, digital + analog clocks, a month calendar, a per-core CPU grid, a GPU panel, a battery indicator, a disk/storage panel, a top-process monitor, an audio spectrum, a now-playing card, a weather card, a stock ticker, an application fence or zone, a web iframe, action buttons, and Home Assistant tiles — sensor- or formula-driven and fully restylable (reference).
- Sensors: CPU (total/per-core/freq), memory + swap, network, disks (+ I/O), uptime, battery, the busiest process (by CPU/RAM/disk/GPU), and NVIDIA GPU (NVML) — demand-gated, so only what's on screen is sampled.
- Now playing: Windows media via GSMTC — Spotify, foobar2000, browsers, and more (support table).
- Integrations: Home Assistant (live states + light/climate controls), MQTT, stock quotes, and weather (Open-Meteo, keyless).
- Overlay: transparent, click-through, always-on-top, one per monitor — per-widget click-through still lets buttons/controls catch clicks. Single-instance, optional autostart.
- Studio: visual editor — drag/resize/snap a CSS-flow layout, browse sensors, build reusable
widgets, edit themes, import/export "sacks".
Ctrl+Alt+E; live-reloadedwidgets.json. - Templates: one-click starter groups (clock, system, network, now-playing) recreated from classic Rainmeter skins.
- Macros: bind a button to a sequence of actions (HA service calls, media transport).
- Plugin packages: drop-in template/theme bundles from the community — declarative, opt-in, scanned (authoring guide).
- Theming: per-widget CSS (highlighting/linting editor), design-token themes (one for every monitor, or a different theme per monitor), system fonts.
- Window zones: define snap regions and drag any app's window — including custom-titlebar apps like Electron/UWP — into them, or auto-arrange open windows by rule.
- Perfect for secondary and side monitors: Corsair Xeneon Edge, Lamptron, Turzx, etc.
- Built with Tauri + React.
widgetsack is a web-first take on what a widget suite does — system meters, clocks, now-playing, and a transparent always-on-top overlay — with a few differences:
- Higher memory usage: as this is a web and browser-based overlay each monitor with active widgets will take a minimum of 100MB of RAM and 40MB of VRAM
- Sensor + meter instead of
.ini: the same measure→meter idea (a sensor feeds a meter), but you wire it in a visual studio instead of hand-editing config files. Layout is CSS flexbox and styling is plain per-widget CSS + design tokens. - Built-in skins as templates: the bundled templates recreate classic skin layouts and drop in with one click; build your own reusable widgets in the widget designer.
- Built-in sources: beyond local system sensors, pull in Home Assistant, MQTT, and live stock quotes.
- Layout containers: Grids, rows, columns and floating widgets that use HTML and CSS for styling
Download the installer from the latest release.
The overlay starts passive (click-through). To arrange widgets:
- Enter edit mode — the tray icon's "Edit layout", or press
Ctrl+Alt+E. - Drag widgets to move, drag the handles to resize. Use the palette (bottom-left) to add widgets and the inspector to edit a selected widget's sensor / position / config.
- Exit edit mode the same way. The layout saves to
widgets.json(in the app config dir) and reloads automatically if you hand-edit that file.
Each widget can take a CSS override. Eg, to turn images grayscale:
img {
filter: grayscale(1);
}If multiple audio sources are active, a priority list of executable names decides which to show (reachable in edit mode; "All media" lists the current sources).
Toggle autostart in settings, or add widgetsack.exe to Startup apps in Task Manager.
widgetsack has two plugin layers, both managed from the studio's Plugins section:
- Built-in integrations — Home Assistant, MQTT, stock quotes, and the AI provider are first-party plugins configured in the studio. Tokens and API keys stay in the Rust backend; the webview never holds them.
- Third-party plugin packages — drop-in community bundles that add templates
(ready-made widget clusters with insert-time options), optionally a theme, and optionally
a sandboxed sensor source: a small
source.jsthat polls an HTTP API and feeds custom sensors you can bind to any meter or formula aspkg.<id>.*.
Install a package by dropping its folder into the app-config plugins/ directory, or via
Plugins → Packages → Install from URL… — paste owner/repo, a GitHub link, or any https
plugin.json URL. Update checks are manual (per-package Check updates); nothing is fetched in
the background.
Packages are opt-in and sandboxed by design:
- Nothing runs on install. Every package lands disabled; enabling it is a per-machine allowlist, and re-installing starts from zero trust.
- Templates and themes are declarative data — a package can't ship its own components. The
only code surface is
source.js, which runs in a QuickJS-in-WASM sandbox with zero capabilities: no network, no DOM, no Tauri, a ~100 ms CPU budget per tick. - The host does the fetching against a Rust-enforced https allowlist of exact hostnames the manifest declares — consented by name on first enable, re-confirmed if an update changes the list.
- Theme CSS is the trust boundary: it's scanned (remote
url()/@import, viewport overlays), and a flagged theme asks for explicit confirmation. Don't enable packages from sources you don't trust.
To write one, see the authoring guide and the reference sample pack — a parameterized clock template, a weather card driven by a sandboxed open-meteo source, and a small theme, CI-tested against the real pipeline on every build.
Build/run instructions, the test gates, and the release process live in docs/development.md. The architecture and roadmap are in docs/widget-platform.md.
Licensed under either of
- Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
- MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
at your option.
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.
