DeskLayer

MAKE WINDOWS YOURS

Your taskbar, your wallpaper, your rules. DeskLayer swaps the stock Windows taskbar for a fully custom floating dock and turns your desktop into a living canvas. No two setups have to look the same.

A REAL TASKBAR, ONLY YOURS

Ditch the rigid Windows bar. DeskLayer draws a floating dock that works like a taskbar should, then lets you rebuild every inch of it in a full drag-and-drop editor.

• It actually works: pinned and running apps, click to launch or switch, right-click jump lists, window previews on hover, and Windows-style app grouping

• Free-form layout: move, resize, group and nest every element, with smart alignment guides

• Per-item looks: design each app tile's icon plus its active, running and notification states

• Editable tray: Wi-Fi, volume, battery and clock as separate, restyleable pieces

• Built-in controls: Start, Task View, Show Desktop, clock, media controls, and volume / brightness sliders, all editable

• Custom launchers: pin folders, websites, or any app with its own arguments and icon

• Auto-hide and peek: reserve a gap or hide on maximize, peek on hover, with hover-preview thumbnails

• Shape and style: pill or panel, shapes, themes, fonts, bevels and gradients, from pixel-art to glass

LIVE WALLPAPERS, DONE RIGHT

Bring your desktop to life with video, GIF and HTML wallpapers, then color-grade and tune them live without ever opening a separate app. Browse a built-in gallery of cards, drop in your own file, and dial it in.

• Real-time grading: brightness, contrast, saturation, blur, tint and vignette, all applied live as you drag the slider

• Playback control: trim, loop, speed and volume, or freeze on a single static frame to save power

• Genuinely light: a hardware-decoded proxy and adaptive frame-rate keep GPU load tiny, dropping toward 0% whenever a window covers the desktop

• Pauses when it should: wallpaper stops automatically on fullscreen apps, games and anti-cheat, then resumes the moment you are back on the desktop

• HTML wallpapers: run interactive web-based backgrounds, not just looping video

WIDGETS YOU BUILD FROM SCRATCH

Design your own clocks, art and live-data tiles in a full editor, not a list of presets you are stuck with. Zoom in to place a single pixel, then drop the widget anywhere on your dock or desktop.

• Full design editor: shapes, text, images and GIFs, with per-character styling, fonts, colors and alignment

• Precision tools: free zoom, a click-to-zoom magnifier, pan and fit-to-content, plus an in-canvas crop tool

• Live data: real clock, date, battery and now-playing values shown as you design, not placeholder text

• States: make a widget change look depending on what is happening, and show or hide it on a condition

• Shareable: export any widget as a file and hand it to a friend

PRESETS AND SHARING

A look you love should travel. Save your entire setup as a preset and re-apply it in one click, or pack it into a single file to share.

• One-click looks: save the whole desktop, taskbar plus wallpaper plus widgets, and switch between them instantly

• Gallery of your work: every preset gets a live thumbnail, a running badge and quick actions

• Deep capture: presets remember your layout, styling, pinned apps, dock behavior, zones and wallpaper edits, not just colors

• Send it anywhere: export presets and widgets as files to share your designs

MULTI-MONITOR AND MULTI-BAR

One bar is just the start. Run as many bars as you want, on every screen, each with its own design.

• As many bars as you like: top, bottom and side bars, multiple per monitor, each independently designed

• Per-monitor everything: a different bar, a different wallpaper, a mirror, or a pause on each screen

• Mirror with one toggle: copy your main bar to other monitors and keep the layout, or design each one by hand

• Hot-plug aware: plug in a monitor and your bars and wallpaper follow automatically

• On-screen designer: edit your bar right on the desktop at full size, exactly as it will look

• Reserved space: bars can hold real screen space so maximized windows never overlap them, including a clean top-bar look

YOURS TO COOK

DeskLayer gets out of your way. Everything is draggable, everything is editable, nothing is locked. Group and nest elements, snap to guides, undo freely, and start from a preset or a blank canvas. The result is a desktop that is unmistakably yours.

BEFORE YOU INSTALL, PLEASE READ

DeskLayer customizes the Windows shell. It hides the default taskbar, draws its own dock, and runs a tiny watchdog so your real taskbar always comes back if DeskLayer ever closes. Because those behaviors look similar to what some malware does, certain antivirus, including Windows Defender, may show a one-time false-positive warning on first launch, especially before the app builds reputation.

DeskLayer is safe. It does not inject into other programs, collect your data, or modify game files. If you get a warning, choose Allow or Run anyway, or add the install folder to your antivirus exclusions:

Steam\steamapps\common\DeskLayer