glassbar

A glassy, always-on-top floating dock + HUD for Windows. Coexists with the auto-hidden Windows taskbar.

Status: early release (v0.1.0). Bugs and rough edges expected on non-1080p / multi-monitor / fractional-DPI configurations. Issues and PRs warmly welcomed.

Features

• Dock — pinned + running app icons, click to launch / focus / minimize, right-click for window list + pin / unpin, drag to reorder. Auto-shows on cursor-bottom, slides away when you leave.
• Spotlight launcher — Win-key tap or the dock's launcher button opens a glassy search overlay. Indexes the Start Menu, UWP / Microsoft Store apps (via Get-StartApps), and files in your common folders. Acronym + fuzzy / typo-tolerant matching.
• HUD — clock, Open-Meteo weather (any city via the in-app picker), CPU / RAM / network throughput, now-playing media, audio device switcher, file stash with native drag-out, Cloudflare WARP toggle, system power menu. Drag to reposition, click the dock toggle to show / hide.
• Glass — Win11 acrylic backdrop, layered transparency, hand-drawn SVG icons for system apps.

Install

Free code signing on Windows provided by SignPath.io, certificate by the SignPath Foundation.

All downloads live on the Releases page:

File	Size	What it is
glassbar_<version>_x64_en-US.msi	~2.7 MB	Installer (recommended)
glassbar.exe	~5.5 MB	Portable main app
uninstall.exe	~280 KB	Uninstaller — restores the Windows taskbar and wipes user data

Option A — Installer (recommended)

1. Download and run the MSI.
2. Installs to Program Files\glassbar\, adds a Start-menu entry, registers an Apps & Features uninstaller, and drops uninstall.exe next to the main app.
3. Launch glassbar from Start. The dock auto-shows when your cursor reaches the bottom of the screen.
4. (Optional) Open the HUD → Settings → toggle Launch at sign-in for autostart.

Option B — Portable

1. Download glassbar.exe (and uninstall.exe if you want a clean teardown later) and put them in the same folder, e.g. C:\Tools\glassbar\.
2. Double-click glassbar.exe to run — no install, no admin prompt, no Start-menu entry.
3. To autostart, drop a shortcut into shell:startup (paste that into Run / File Explorer) or toggle Launch at sign-in in the HUD's Settings.

Uninstall

Pick whichever is more convenient:

• MSI build — Settings → Apps → Installed apps → glassbar → Uninstall.
  • Or run uninstall.exe from Program Files\glassbar\ (it ships next to glassbar.exe). It hands off to msiexec /x, restores the Windows taskbar, removes autostart, and wipes user data + cache.
• Portable — download uninstall.exe from the Releases page (or run the one already next to your portable glassbar.exe). It runs the same cleanup steps, then you delete glassbar.exe yourself.

Either path also restores the standard Windows taskbar in case glassbar was killed without its exit handler running — that's the part you can't get back via "delete the file" alone.

Privacy

glassbar does not collect, store, or transmit any user data — no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no phone-home, no account system.

What stays on your machine:

• Pinned apps, HUD position, stash files, autostart preference, weather city selection — all in %APPDATA%\glassbar\ (cleared by the uninstaller).
• WebView2 cache for the dock / HUD UI in %LOCALAPPDATA%\com.glassbar.app\.
• Spotlight's app index (built from your Start Menu and Get-StartApps) and file index (your Desktop / Documents / Downloads / Pictures / Videos / Music folders) — held in process memory only.
• Claude Code transcripts under %USERPROFILE%\.claude\projects\ are read, but only locally — nothing leaves the machine.

The only outbound network requests:

• api.open-meteo.com and geocoding-api.open-meteo.com — fetches the current weather for the city you select in HUD → Settings. Sends the city name (geocoding) and lat/lon (forecast). No API key, no account.
• warp-cli invocations talk to Cloudflare WARP locally; if WARP is active, your traffic flows through Cloudflare's network, but glassbar itself only toggles WARP — it doesn't transmit data through it.

That's it. There is no first-party server, no third-party SDK, no identifier sent anywhere. Source is fully open under MIT for inspection.

Build from source

Requires Rust (stable). The WiX Toolset is needed for the MSI bundle and ships preinstalled on windows-latest GitHub runners.

cargo install tauri-cli --version "^2.0"
cd src-tauri
cargo tauri build

The MSI installer is written to src-tauri/target/release/bundle/msi/.

Releasing

Tag a commit with vX.Y.Z and push the tag. .github/workflows/release.yml runs cargo tauri build on a Windows runner and attaches the MSI to a GitHub Release automatically:

git tag v0.1.0
git push origin v0.1.0

A manual run is also wired in via the workflow's Run workflow button — that leaves the MSI as a workflow artifact instead of publishing a release.

Configuration

Files live in %APPDATA%\glassbar\glassbar\data\:

• pinned.json — array of { "path", "display_name", "icon_path"? }. Hot-reloaded on save.
• settings.json — { "hud_position": [x, y]?, "auto_start": bool }.

A starter pinned.example.json ships in the repo.

Auto-start at login

Toggle from the dock devtools (or call set_autostart programmatically). Disabled by default.

Requirements

• Windows 10 (1809+) or Windows 11
• WebView2 runtime (preinstalled on Win11)

Limitations (v1)

• Single primary monitor only.
• No third-party system tray hosting (planned).
• No in-app settings UI — edit JSON for now.
• One glass theme.