Atelier

Atelier is an all-in-one desktop customization suite for Windows 10 and 11 built with Rust and Tauri v2. Through its Studio, Atelier styles the native Windows taskbar or provides a standalone Custom Taskbar dock, tailors system surface materials with Mica and Acrylic backdrops, and adds fluid physics-based window animations. It features an interactive Dynamic Island, live video and 2D scene wallpapers, audio-reactive visualizers, and customizable desktop widgets — all engineered with zero-allocation telemetry and automatic memory trimming for near-zero idle CPU and RAM usage.

Features

• Windows Taskbar: configure materials, floating geometry and presets. On supported Windows 11 XAML taskbars, adjust app button and icon appearance.

• Custom Taskbar: a separate dock for pinned shortcuts and running windows, with display and edge selection, appearance controls, per-app visibility, auto-hide and a configurable gap below maximized windows. It hides the native Windows taskbar while enabled and hides itself when a fullscreen app is active on its display. Some native tray and language controls are not reliably accessible while the taskbar is hidden; see Desktop dock.

  

• Recovery: the dock uses a helper process before hiding Explorer windows; native taskbar positioning has a separate guardian. See Failure Modes & Recovery.

• Wallpapers: import MP4/WebM files, apply and manage them in a local library, and configure playback and scene quality. The Workshop tab discovers Wallpaper Engine items already downloaded by Steam; browse the Workshop, subscribe in Steam, refresh, then import a supported video or 2D scene. Atelier does not download Workshop items directly. See Wallpapers and Workshop.

  

• Scenes: play supported 2D Wallpaper Engine scenes with per-wallpaper and author-provided controls. Compatibility is partial: custom shaders, SceneScript, 3D models and some effects and animations are not supported. See Scene playback.

• Widgets: configure desktop clock, calendar, system, media, battery, notes, weather, photo and countdown widgets.

  

• Dynamic Island: an optional top-of-screen panel with media controls, a monthly calendar and battery status. Choose a display, position, appearance, modules and opening behavior in the Dynamic Island tab. The panel expands and collapses with an animation. Calendar events are not connected.

  

• Animations: customize window opening, minimizing, and restoring transitions with Scale, Genie, Glide, and Spring physics, alongside dock icon launch bouncing, hover wave magnification, and click feedback.

  

• System Appearance: customize surface materials and transparency across Windows system surfaces (File Explorer, Clock, Tray, Language switcher, and Settings) with Mica, Mica Alt, Acrylic, and Glass backdrops, active and inactive window opacity, rounded/square corner preferences, and custom window borders.

  

• Audio reactivity: add a movable desktop visualizer with bars, wave, dots, circle or a symmetric wave. Customize its colors, glow, transparent background, size, sensitivity and smoothing; it responds to the default system output. Optional pulse and glow effects can also be enabled per wallpaper, and the desktop dock can react with glow and shape changes. See Audio reactivity.

  

Architecture

flowchart LR
    Studio["Studio UI · WebView2"] <-->|"Tauri commands and events"| App["atelier-ui · Rust"]
    App --> Taskbar["atelier-taskbar"]
    Taskbar --> Explorer["Explorer taskbar"]
    Taskbar --> Bridge["C++ XAML bridge"]
    Bridge --> Explorer
    App --> Dock["Dock window and state"]
    Dock --> Explorer
    Dock --> Apps["Windows apps and shortcuts"]
    App --> Wallpaper["Wallpaper library and player"]
    Wallpaper --> Steam["Downloaded Steam Workshop items"]
    App --> Widgets["Desktop widgets"]
    App --> Audio["Audio capture and analysis"]
    App --> Appearance["System Appearance & Animations"]
    Appearance --> DWM["Windows DWM & Shell"]
    Dock --> Guardian["Recovery helper"]

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The Tauri application is the primary Studio entry point. The separate atelier-core binary has its own tray and initialization path and is not the Tauri IPC backend. Details: Architecture.

Resource Efficiency and Performance

Atelier is engineered to run continuously in the background with a minimal footprint:

• Low Idle CPU (< 0.5%): Employs an event-driven design, avoiding continuous polling loops and waking up only on foreground window changes or user interaction. WASAPI audio loopback capture automatically idles when reactive visualizers are inactive or occluded.
• Zero-Allocation NT Process Sampling: Queries process metrics using NtQuerySystemInformation (SystemProcessInformation) directly with a reusable static memory buffer, completely avoiding runtime heap allocation churn.
• Automatic Working Set Trimming: Periodically purges unreferenced physical pages via EmptyWorkingSet across the main process and child WebView2 runtimes, keeping active Private Working Set RAM between ~100 MB and 160 MB.

Documentation

Guides and architecture

• Documentation index
• System Appearance
• System Animations & Window Transitions
• Desktop dock
• Wallpapers and Workshop
• Audio reactivity
• Architecture and data flow
• Repository structure
• Configuration and storage
• Compatibility
• Failure modes and recovery
• Development and testing
• Scene playback and compatibility
• Security considerations
• Contributing · Code of Conduct · Changelog

Crate references

The names below match the directories in crates/. Cargo package names retain the atelier- prefix.

• common — configuration, presets and errors.
• core — experimental daemon and tray.
• taskbar — Explorer styling, positioning and recovery.
• ui — Studio, wallpaper and widget controls, and the separate dock.
• wallpaper — desktop hosting, wallpaper formats and rendering infrastructure.
• audio — audio capture and spectrum analysis.
• widget — widget windows and data providers.

Build and run

Prerequisites: Windows 10/11, a stable Rust MSVC toolchain, Visual C++ Build Tools with a Windows SDK, and WebView2 Runtime. The XAML bridge is compiled from C++ during the Cargo build. See Compatibility for Windows-specific limitations.

cargo check --workspace
cargo run -p atelier-ui --bin Atelier

For a development copy that does not lock target\debug\Atelier.exe, run scripts\run-dev.cmd. It stops matching Atelier development processes before rebuilding; see Development.

Tests

cargo test -p atelier-common
cargo test -p atelier-ui --lib
cargo test -p atelier-wallpaper --lib
node --test crates/ui/tests/*.test.cjs
cargo check --workspace

The repository also contains an isolated dock smoke test and Playwright UI tests. Some taskbar integration tests interact with the real Explorer taskbar; read Development and testing before running them.

License

Atelier is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.