AppRig Documentation

Getting started

After install, AppRig places an icon in your taskbar tray (next to the clock). The main window opens centred on your primary monitor the first time you launch it.

The tray icon is your home base

• Click the tray icon to show or hide the main window.
• Right-click the tray icon for a menu with Quick add, Settings, and Quit.
• Closing the main window with × hides it back to the tray. It doesn’t quit. Use the tray menu’s Quit to fully exit.

What’s seeded on first launch

A fresh install is pre-filled with example data so you can see what AppRig can do rather than starting from an empty window. You get a short Start Here (Example) list covering the handful of things the hint bar can’t show you on hover (global hotkeys, Quick Add, the tray menu, the peek dot, cloud sync, and the paste / formatting tricks), plus three colour-coded example projects: Acme Website (Example) in turquoise, Brand Design (Example) in amber, and Personal (Example) in green.

Each project ties three things together with one colour: its notes list, its saved workspace layout (the colour appears as a dot on the workspace pill), and its Time Tracker job. So the colour-coding idea is shown rather than explained. The Time Tracker and Habit Tracker also come pre-filled with a few weeks of example history so their charts aren’t empty. Have a look around, then delete the examples and start your own records. AppRig will not re-seed once you’ve started.

The main window

The main window has three parts:

• Title bar with the help, settings, board, keep-on-top (pin), dock, and close buttons, plus the notification bell and workspace pill.
• Activity bar with one tab per sub-tool plus a Notes tab. The tabs toggle each panel in or out of view.
• Notes panel showing your lists and cards (when the Notes tab is active).

Title-bar buttons

The title-bar buttons (help, settings, board, keep-on-top, dock) stay visible all the time rather than fading out when the mouse moves away. Each glyph is grey normally and turns white while its mode is on (board layout on, kept on top, docked) and the help button turns blue while the hint bar is showing.

The hint bar

Click the help (?) button in the title bar to show a thin strip along the top of the window that explains whatever control you point at, including the relevant hotkeys. When you switch it on it shows “Hover over a tool to see what it does.” until you point at your first control. Click the button again to hide the strip; your choice is remembered. On by default.

Pinning the window

The pin button in the top-right toggles always on top. Pinned, AppRig stays above other windows so you can keep notes visible while working in another app.

Docking to the screen edge

The dock button snaps the window to whichever screen edge (left or right) is closer to the window’s current position. Drag the window to the side you want and click Dock. The icon and tooltip update as you drag to show which edge it would snap to. Click the dock button again to undock and float freely.

Resizing

The window auto-fits to whatever’s open: hide the notes panel and a sub-tool panel and AppRig shrinks to fit. Drag the bottom edge while the notes panel is visible to set your preferred notes height. That preference sticks across toggles. The top edge of the toolbar is a 10 px resize hot-zone, so you can grab the window from the very top to resize it vertically.

Hiding it completely

Toggle every tab off and the window collapses to just the title bar plus the activity bar. Click any tab to bring its panel back.

Close button

The × button hides the window to the tray rather than quitting. Same behaviour as Discord, Slack, and similar tray-resident apps. Use Quit in the tray menu to fully exit AppRig.

There’s no Minimize button on Home. It created a third state (visible / hidden / minimized) the global show/hide toggle couldn’t always recover from. Win+Down still works as a Windows-level minimize, and the show/hide hotkey restores from it.

Tray-only mode

In Settings → Window, turn on Tray-only mode to hide AppRig from the taskbar entirely. The main window, pop-out lists and tools, and the Time Tracker’s All sessions window all stay off the taskbar. In this mode AppRig is only reachable via the tray icon, the global hotkey (Ctrl+Alt+S), or Quick Add. Toggling it updates every open window immediately.

Hover-corner peek-through

Move the cursor into the corner of the main window and AppRig hides itself so you can click whatever app is behind it. A small dot stays at that corner as a visual anchor for where AppRig was, and stays click-through so it never traps a click meant for the app behind. On by default.

The first few times you peek, a small hint appears beside the corner dot telling you how to bring the window back (it names your show/hide hotkey, Ctrl+Alt+S by default). It has a single Change how peek works in Settings link that opens Settings → Window (where you can turn peek off or switch it to auto-restore), plus a “Don’t show this again” checkbox. Pressing the hotkey both restores the window and clears the corner dot.

Peek-through is a docked-window feature. The dot follows the docked edge: docked to the left of the screen, it sits at the top-left so you don’t have to cross the whole window to reach it; docked to the right, it stays at the top-right. When the window is floating (undocked) there’s no screen edge to tuck into, so peek-through is off and the dot is hidden. Turning peek-through off in Settings hides the dot entirely too.

Peek hides only your unpinned floating windows: pinned sticky notes, pop-outs, and lists stay on screen, while unpinned ones disappear along with the main window. The floating Time Tracker sessions window is hidden by peek too. The setting that controls this is “Peek hides unpinned windows too”.

Two further options sit under the toggle in Settings → Window:

• Auto-restore when cursor moves away (on by default). On: the window comes back as soon as the cursor moves further than the configured distance from the dot. Off: the dot acts as a switch. Hover it again to bring AppRig back, or use the show/hide hotkey or tray icon.
• Auto-restore distance slider, from 50 to 2000 px (default 500). Higher values suit larger or higher-DPI monitors.

Multi-monitor: window follows your cursor

When you open the home window from the tray (or via the global hotkey) and it’s undocked, it appears on whichever monitor your cursor is currently on. Docked windows stay anchored to their docked edge.

Notes & cards

Three view states

Each card cycles through three view states when you click it:

1. Single-line preview (most compact)
2. Three-line preview
3. Fully expanded

Editing

Hover a card and click the pencil icon, or press Ctrl+Click to enter edit mode. Click outside or press Esc to save. In Settings → Cards & lists you can swap clicks so plain click goes straight to edit instead.

Formatting

Standard rich-text shortcuts work inside cards:

• Ctrl+B: Bold
• Ctrl+I: Italic
• Ctrl+U: Underline

Type a hyphen (or *) and a space at the start of a line to begin a bullet list, or a number and a dot (1.) to begin a numbered list. Press Enter on an empty item to end the list.

Build multi-level lists with Tab and Shift+Tab: Tab inside a list item indents it into a sub-bullet, Shift+Tab outdents it, and Shift+Tab on a top-level item turns the line back into plain text. Sub-levels are numbered automatically: bulleted lists step through a filled dot, a hollow dot, then a square as you indent; numbered lists step through 1. then a. then i. Typing - or * inside a numbered list turns that one line into a bullet where the cursor is, rather than adding a stray bullet above the whole list.

Pasting a bullet or numbered list copied from Word, VS Code, or another note keeps its structure. The markers turn into real list items instead of literal “1.” text you have to clean up. Copying a list out of a note keeps its markers too: it pastes as - item / 1. item into plain-text targets like a code editor or chat box, and as formatted bullets into Word or Outlook.

Add a link with [label](https://example.com). In edit mode, Ctrl+Click the blue text to open the link in your browser.

Pasting an image (Ctrl+V) inserts it inline. Image data is stored with the card and survives save/reload.

Resizing pasted images

Pasted images are automatically sized to fit the card width on insertion, so you never get a big screenshot blowing past the card’s edge. Click any image in edit mode to enter resize mode. A thin accent border appears, with a small drag-handle on the right edge and a corner-handle at the bottom-right.

Drag either handle to resize. The width is aspect-locked (height tracks the original picture’s ratio), clamped to a minimum of 48 px, and capped at the card’s content width. The chosen size persists with the card and is applied the next time the card is rendered.

Click anywhere outside the image, or press Esc, to leave resize mode.

Card header icons

Hovering a card reveals a row of action icons. From left to right: delete, edit (pencil), pop out as a sticky, due date (clock), favourite (star), keep open (eye), and lock to top (up-arrow). The due-date, keep-open, and lock-to-top icons stay visible while they’re active; the rest appear only on hover.

• Star adds the card to the synthetic Favourites group at the top of the main window.
• Eye keeps the card fully expanded all the time, regardless of the three-state cycle.
• Up-arrow locks the card to the top of its list.

The clock (due date) is covered under Reminders & due dates below.

The up-arrow “lock to top” is a distinct control from the pin (keep-on-top) button on a floating or popped-out card or list. The two are independent: locking a card or list to the top no longer keeps its floating window on top, and pinning a floating window on top no longer changes the docked order. The up-arrow shows consistently in the main window and in popped-out lists.

Reordering & moving

Drag a card by its edge to reorder it within a list, or to move it into another list entirely, including into and out of popped-out single-list windows. A translucent ghost of the card follows the cursor and the surrounding cards reflow to open a slot where it will land, so you see the result directly; release to drop it into the slot. Ctrl+Z undoes the most recent card move.

Empty lists work too: drop a card onto the + New card row at the bottom of any list (the row that’s visible even when the list has no cards) and the card moves into that list, appended at the end.

List-level cycle

Hover a list title to reveal a chevron on the right. Click it to cycle every card in that list through the same three view states. Useful when you want a uniform view of a whole list.

Zoom anchoring

Hold Ctrl and scroll over your notes to zoom the note text in and out; the card under your cursor stays anchored in place as the size changes, and Ctrl+0 resets it. This zooms the note text only. The rest of the interface is sized by Interface size (Settings → Window), and scrolling with Ctrl over a sub-tool resizes that tool instead. Scroll position also stays where you left it after editing a card. AppRig no longer nudges the viewport after you save.

Reminders & due dates

Any card can carry a due date and an optional time. When the time comes round AppRig fires a Windows tray toast; clicking the toast pops the card out as a floating sticky so it’s already in front of you.

Setting a due date

Hover a card and click the clock icon in the icon strip (also available in the toolbar of any popped-out sticky). A small calendar popup opens with:

• Three quick-pick chips at the top: Today, Tomorrow, and the next instance of your configured quick-pick weekday (defaults to Friday).
• An inline month calendar. Click any day to pick it.
• A Reminder time dropdown in 15-minute increments, pre-filled with the current time of day. Adjust it as needed, or clear it to set a date-only due (no toast will fire).
• Set to save, Clear to remove the due date, and (when the existing date is already overdue) a Snooze button that bumps it forward by your configured snooze interval.

How the card shows the due date

Once set, the due date sits in the card header, always visible, even when the card is in its compact single-line view. The header colour warms as the deadline approaches: the accent tint kicks in within 24 hours, brightens once the due date is today, and switches to red once the time has passed. The shift is driven by a per-minute tick so the colour updates live while AppRig is open. The “last edited” timestamp moves into a tooltip on those cards (so the header doesn’t get crowded).

A popped-out (floating) card reflects the same status. Its clock icon stays lit whenever a due date is set and turns red once the card is overdue, and the card’s top-left corner shows the due date (or the card’s list name when you hover it).

The notification bell

A notification bell sits to the left of the search box. It’s always there (grey) so you know where to look; when a card is overdue or due within the next 24 hours it turns white and shows a small count circle in its top-right corner, coloured by how urgent the nearest deadline is. A softer accent as one approaches, the accent colour for something due today, and red once anything is overdue. Click it to open a flyout listing the due-soon cards alongside the overdue ones.

Each reminder in the flyout has two buttons: a Dismiss tick and a clear ×. Dismiss stops the note counting toward the bell’s badge but keeps it listed (greyed) so you can still see what’s due, and leaves its due date and reminder intact. The card stays flagged and the reminder still pops at its due time. Click the tick again to count it once more; changing the note’s due date also brings it back into the count. Clear removes the due date outright. You can also pop a card out as a sticky from the flyout.

What happens when it fires

A standard Windows tray toast appears titled AppRig · Due. Click it and AppRig opens that note as a floating sticky window (auto-pinned so it stays on top while you decide what to do with it).

If several reminders come due at the same moment they’re batched into a single N reminders due. Click to pop out. toast. Clicking pops every one of them out as its own sticky. From there you can deal with each individually, or just close the windows you don’t need.

Reminders that come due while AppRig is closed aren’t lost; they fire on the next launch.

Settings

The Settings → Notes & lists page collects the reminder-related controls:

• Reminders enabled: master switch. When off, due dates can still be set on cards but no toasts will fire.
• Snooze duration: 5 / 10 / 15 / 30 / 60 min. Used by the Snooze button in the calendar popup.
• Quick-pick weekday: which day the third quick-pick chip targets (defaults to Friday).

Setting a due date no longer needs a pre-configured default time. The Reminder time popup is pre-filled with the current time of day, so the old “Default reminder time” setting has been removed.

Notification sound

Under Settings → Notes & lists, turn on Play a Windows sound on notification to have AppRig play a system sound whenever it shows a notification. On by default. A dropdown lets you pick which sound (Notification, Reminder, Mail, Asterisk, Exclamation, or Critical Stop) and previews it when you choose. The sound stays silent while Do Not Disturb / Focus Assist is on (and during full-screen apps and presentations). Silent mode (the tray menu) still mutes notifications entirely.

Lists

Creating

Click + New list at the bottom of the notes panel and type a name. The list is only saved once you give it one. Click away (or press Esc) from the name box without typing anything and the new list is discarded rather than left behind as an empty “New list”. Inline rename later works the same way as a card: click the title, type, click outside.

Collapsing

Click anywhere on a list header (the chevron, the name, or the empty space beside it) to fold the list closed; click again to expand. Alt+click anywhere on the header pops the list out into its own window instead. Useful when you have lots of lists and want to focus on one.

Reordering

Drag a list by its title row to reorder it relative to other lists.

Board view

The Board toggle in the top toolbar lays your lists out as side-by-side columns, like a board, instead of one stacked column. Turning it on widens the window to the multi-pane layout; turning it off restores your previous size. In board view, drag a list’s header sideways to reorder columns (cards still drag within and between columns), and collapsed lists shrink to a slim column.

Board mode keeps its own collapse state, separate from single-list view. The board starts with every column expanded, so folding a column on the board doesn’t affect which lists are collapsed in single-list view, and vice versa.

On the board, a plain mouse wheel always scrolls a list up and down; hold Shift and scroll to move the board left and right between columns (the pan glides and builds momentum on a fast spin). You can also click and drag to move the board sideways: drag any empty space on the board with the left mouse button, or drag from anywhere (even over a card) with the middle mouse button.

List header buttons

Hovering a list header reveals its action icons. From left to right: delete, recolour, rename, open in own window, cycle card view, and lock to top. They fade in whenever the cursor is anywhere over the AppRig window, and fade out only when the cursor leaves, so you can move the mouse between lists without the icons flickering on and off as you go. (Delete and rename are hidden on the Favourites and Clipboard system lists.)

Recolouring

Hover a list title and click the colour swatch icon to pick a new accent colour from the palette popup. The palette colours offered match the active theme, so the swatches always look good alongside your other lists. Use Match colours in Settings → Theme to remap all your lists to the nearest swatch in the current theme’s palette in one go.

The Favourites group

A synthetic group at the very top of the workspace shows every starred card from any list, in one place. It can’t be renamed, deleted, or recoloured, and it hides itself entirely while it’s empty. So a fresh setup (or one where you’ve un-starred everything) doesn’t show a bare “Favourites” header.

Favourites supports the same Open in own window button as a regular list (in its header). The popped-out Favourites window shows each card’s home-list name on hover (instead of a timestamp) and refreshes live as you star or unstar cards anywhere in the workspace. Add-new-card and rename are hidden in the popout, since Favourites itself isn’t a real list.

The Clipboard list

If the Clipboard sub-tool is enabled, a special Clipboard list appears at the bottom of the notes panel. It always stays neutral grey. “Match colours” intentionally skips it, since grey is part of its identity as a system list. See Sub-tool: Clipboard for how it behaves.

Pop-out sticky notes

Alt+Click any card to pop it out as a sticky note that floats over your desktop. Edits in the sticky sync back to the original card live. Click the original card again to dock the sticky back into the list.

Each pop-out sticky has its own pin button (top-right of the sticky). Click it to toggle always on top so the sticky stays in view while you work in other windows. A sticky is an independent top-level window: its pin is its own, and it no longer jumps in front of other apps when you click the main window. Use the show/hide hotkey (Ctrl+Alt+S) or the tray icon to bring the whole workspace forward together. Sticky positions and pin states persist across sessions.

Quick Add

Open Quick Add by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S from anywhere in Windows, or right-click the tray icon and choose Quick add. Either way, you can drop a thought into any list without opening the main window. It opens centered on the monitor your cursor is on. The dialog remembers the last list you used. Pin the dialog (the pin icon in the corner) to keep it open across multiple captures. The editor is seamless: borderless and transparent against the card, so jotting a note feels exactly like editing one in a list.

Press Ctrl+Enter or Alt+Enter to save. Esc or closing the dialog saves any draft you typed. If AppRig itself closes with a Quick Add note still open, that draft is saved rather than discarded. Paste images with Ctrl+V.

Drag the Quick Add window by any non-interactive area (the sides, the top margin, the space around the editor) to reposition it anywhere on screen.

The activity bar

The activity bar is a single row of tabs at the top (or bottom) of the main window. The tab row is centred along the bar so it stays visually balanced as you add or remove sub-tools. Each tab toggles a panel in or out of view independently; multiple panels can be active at once. The active tab shows a small accent underline on the bar’s outer edge so you can tell at a glance which panels are open.

Per-tab behaviour

• Notes tab: toggles the main notes/lists area. Hide it when you only need the sub-tools.
• Sub-tool tabs: each opens or closes that sub-tool’s panel.
• Clipboard tab is special: clicking it toggles capture on/off rather than opening a panel. A small badge shows how many cards are in your clipboard history. When capture is paused, a small icon appears in the Clipboard list header as a reminder. Hover it for details.

Bar position

In Settings → Sub-tools you can move the activity bar to the top or the bottom of the window.

Per-panel anchor

Each sub-tool’s panel can be anchored to the top or the bottom of the notes area, independent of where the activity bar sits. Set this in Settings → Sub-tools next to the per-tool toggles.

Auto-resize

The window always fits its content. Toggle a panel off and the window shrinks. Toggle every panel off and the window collapses to just the title bar plus the bar.

Icon-only tabs

The activity bar is icon-only; tab text labels are not shown to keep the bar compact as the sub-tool count grows. Every tab carries a tooltip on hover so you can identify it at a glance, and the active tab shows a small accent underline on the bar’s outer edge.

Right-click for popouts

Right-click any sub-tool icon on the activity bar for a small menu with Pop out (or Re-dock when already popped out). See Sub-tool popouts for the full mechanism.

Alt+click for popouts

Alt+click is the shortcut for the same Pop-out action. It works on the activity-bar icon and anywhere on the sub-tool’s body (the tile in the main window). Plain clicks still toggle the panel; the Alt modifier is what makes the click pop out. The tooltip on each sub-tool icon includes an “Alt+click to pop out” hint so the gesture is discoverable.

Workspaces (saved layouts)

A workspace is a saved snapshot of how AppRig is arranged: which lists and sub-tool panels are open, the window’s position and size, board mode on or off, your pins, and your scroll position and expanded cards. Switch between them from the workspace pill in the title bar to flip your whole layout for a given task or mood.

Saving and updating

Open the workspace menu from the pill in the title bar. Capture the current layout under a name you choose, or update the selected workspace so it matches how things look right now. You can rename or delete any workspace from the same menu.

Switching

Pick a workspace from the pill (or re-pick the current one) to apply it. AppRig reopens the lists and tools it saved, moves and resizes the window, and reopens any floating windows (popped-out tools, list windows, sticky notes) at their saved spots, closing any the target layout didn’t include. A brief loading overlay with a spinner shows while the layout rebuilds, so the window never looks frozen. Switching discards unsaved tweaks to the current layout, so update the workspace first if you want to keep them.

What a workspace remembers

• Open lists and sub-tool panels, board mode, and the window’s position and size.
• Your scroll position (anchored to a card so it stays sensible after you add, delete, or rename things), which cards are expanded, and each list’s collapse-all / expand-all state.
• Optionally, your screen brightness and master / microphone volume. This is off per workspace until you tick Include brightness & sound in the workspace menu, so you can build a dimmed, quiet “evening” layout. (Per-app mixer volumes aren’t included, since apps only have a volume entry while they’re playing.)

Workspace colour

Right-click a workspace in the menu (or right-click the pill itself, which acts on the selected layout) and choose Pick colour… to give it a colour. The colour shows as a dot before the workspace’s name, both in the menu and on the pill when that layout is selected. The same right-click menu also has Clear colour and Delete.

Example workspaces on a new install

A brand-new setup comes with example workspaces so you can see what’s possible. There’s a plain Default layout to return to, plus one for each example project, colour-matched to its project and each opening in a different layout:

• Acme Website (Example) opens the board: every list laid out as side-by-side columns.
• Brand Design (Example) opens a wide layout, with the sub-tool panels beside your notes column.
• Personal (Example) opens a reading layout: the main window docked to the left with the Time Tracker and Habit Tracker open, and the Clipboard popped out to the right.

They’re only added for new setups, and you can rename or delete any of them.

Workspace search

A search box sits on the left side of the home-window toolbar, in line with the pin, dock, settings, and close buttons. Typing into it filters your entire workspace in real time. No separate search screen required.

What gets filtered

• Note cards across every list. Non-matching cards collapse, lists with zero matches disappear entirely.
• Clipboard cards in the Clipboard list. Including image entries, which match the literal word image.
• Quick Access tiles. Matching is done against both the tile label and its target path, so a query of vscode finds tiles labelled “VS Code” as well as tiles pointing at Code.exe. Shelves with no matching tiles collapse.

When nothing matches anywhere, a centred No matches for “<query>” message appears.

How matching works

The search splits your query on spaces; every word must appear somewhere in the card (case-insensitive). A search for meeting notes finds a card containing both “meeting” and “notes” but not one containing only “meeting”.

Keyboard shortcuts

• Ctrl+F: focus the search box from anywhere in the window.
• Esc (first press): clears the query.
• Esc (second press): unfocuses the search box and returns keyboard focus to the window.

While you’re editing a card

A card you’re actively editing stays visible regardless of whether it matches the current query, so typing into a note won’t make it disappear mid-edit. New clipboard captures that arrive while a search is active are also filtered by the current query rather than always appearing at the top.

Sub-tool: Clipboard

The Clipboard sub-tool watches your system clipboard and records every text and image you copy as a card in a dedicated Clipboard list.

What gets captured

• Plain text (anything you copy from a browser, editor, terminal, etc.)
• Text you copy or cut from inside AppRig itself, such as from a note’s editor
• Screenshots from Print Screen and the Windows Snipping Tool
• Images from right-click → Copy image in browsers and other apps

What gets skipped

• Content marked sensitive by the source app. Reputable password managers (1Password, Bitwarden, KeePass) set the appropriate Win32 clipboard format and AppRig honours it.
• Text that the source app has explicitly opted out of clipboard managers.

Using the Clipboard list

• Click any card to re-copy its content. The card flashes to confirm. Text re-copies as text; images re-copy as images. If another app is momentarily holding the clipboard, AppRig retries briefly rather than failing silently, and the “Copied” confirmation only shows once the copy actually succeeds.
• Double-click a card to open it for editing (a single click still re-copies).
• Click the lock icon on a card to pin it. Pinned cards aren’t evicted when the history fills up.
• Toggle capture on/off by clicking the Clipboard tab in the activity bar. The setting persists across sessions. When capture is paused, a small icon appears in the Clipboard list header. Click it to resume capture (or hover for a reminder).

Each card shows which app you copied from, next to its timestamp (e.g. “yesterday · Chrome”). Entries copied before this was added, or whose source app couldn’t be determined, just show the time.

Highlight text to copy

Turn on the Highlight text to copy toggle (at the far-right end of the Clipboard list header, as a compact Auto chip in a popped-out clipboard window’s title bar, or in Settings → Sub-tools → Clipboard, all kept in sync) to capture text the moment you highlight it in any app, without pressing Ctrl+C. Drag-select a span or double-click a word and it lands in the Clipboard list automatically. It is off by default, and selections inside AppRig’s own notes are never captured.

Popping out the Clipboard

Press Ctrl+Alt+V from anywhere to pop the Clipboard list out into its own floating window, much like Windows’ Win+V; press it again to dismiss. The docked Clipboard list header shows the shortcut as a reminder. The popped-out window has a search box (focused on open) that filters entries as you type.

Saved vs Recent

Pinned clips are surfaced as a separate Saved section at the top of the Clipboard list, with the unpinned history below under Recent. Faint hairline separators bracket the Saved section so the boundary is unmistakable, and Recent cards use a slightly darker surface than Saved across every theme so the two stay distinct even when the section headers scroll offscreen.

Clearing the list

A Clear All text link inside the Recent section header clears every unpinned (Recent) entry, with a confirmation prompt. Pinned (Saved) cards are never affected. Hovering the link surfaces a tooltip that says Clear Recent (keeps Saved) so the scope is explicit. The same canonical clear is also available from Settings → Sub-tools → Clipboard → Clear all unpinned.

Large histories

If your clipboard history is long, AppRig shows the most recent 50 entries up front. A Show all X more footer at the bottom of the list reveals the rest on click. Pinned cards always appear regardless of position.

History size

The default cap is 100 entries. Once you exceed the cap, the oldest unpinned cards are evicted. Change the cap (up to 500 entries) in Settings → Sub-tools → Clipboard.

Plain-paste hotkey

The global shortcut Ctrl+Shift+V rewrites the clipboard with the plain-text version of whatever’s currently on it and pastes immediately, which is useful in apps like Outlook or Discord that don’t strip formatting on their own. Image clipboard entries pass through unmodified.

Sub-tool: Quick Access

Quick Access is a panel of tiles for one-click launching of files, folders, apps, and websites.

Adding shortcuts

• Click + on the panel and choose a file, folder, app, or URL.
• Picking app opens a searchable list of your installed apps. It now lists both classic desktop apps and Microsoft Store / packaged apps (such as Slack installed from the Store), not just apps with a Start menu shortcut. Store apps launch through their app id and show a lettered tile icon.
• Or simply drag a file, folder, or URL onto the panel from File Explorer or your browser.
• The Add shortcut dialog has an optional Arguments field for command-line parameters. A Browse dropdown lets you pick a folder or a file with the normal Windows picker and drops its (quoted) path into the field, handy for “open this folder in VS Code” without typing or copy-pasting a path. A Library button next to it opens the curated argument library.
• The Add shortcut dialog stays open when you click outside it, so you can line it up against File Explorer or your browser while filling it in. Close it with Add, Cancel, or Esc. Clicking the main AppRig window gives the dialog a quick pulse to show it is still waiting for you.
• Drag a tile to reorder it within the panel. While you drag, a preview of the icon follows the cursor and a line marks where it will land.

URL tiles show a generated letter icon (the site’s initial on a colour-matched tile) instead of fetching the site’s favicon, so adding a website makes no network request.

The argument library

The Library button next to the Arguments field opens a two-pane browser of ready-made command-line snippets for popular apps. The left rail lists 13 apps across five categories (Web & Browsers, Asset Pipelines & Creator Tools, Developer Tools & Text Editors, Media & Utilities, and My Custom Library), each with its own brand-coloured icon. Select an app on the left and the right pane shows that app’s preset list, around 49 snippets total covering things like Chrome incognito, Chrome with a named profile, VS Code open folder, Blender background render, OBS startup, PowerShell run script, and so on.

Placeholder tokens like {URL}, {PATH}, {PROFILE}, {FRAME} are highlighted in amber inside each preset so they’re easy to spot. Click Use on a preset to copy its template into the Arguments field on the shortcut, then replace the placeholders (curly braces and all) with your real values. For a path placeholder like {PATH} you can let the Browse dropdown do it: pick a folder or file and AppRig fills the placeholder in for you, quoting included.

The Getting started entry at the top of the rail is an explainer for users who’ve never used command-line arguments before: what they are, three concrete examples you can try, and notes on quoting paths with spaces.

Close the library with Esc, the × button in the top-right, or by clicking outside the window. Drag the window from its top edge to reposition it.

Launching elevated

Right-click any tile and tick Run as administrator to launch it elevated via UAC. The setting persists per tile. Declining the UAC prompt is a quiet no-op (no error dialog).

Workspaces

Tiles are organised into named workspaces (shown as toggle tabs at the top of the panel). Click a tab to show or hide that workspace’s tiles. Right-click a tab (or the workspace’s name heading above its tiles) to rename it, delete it, or set a colour for its name. A chosen colour tints both the tab and the heading; “Default colour” clears it back to the standard look. The tabs sit centred on the row, including each row when they wrap onto more than one line.

The edit (pencil) button is a small icon in the top-right corner. In edit mode you can drag the workspace tabs to reorder them, and a + add-workspace button appears (it is only shown in edit mode).

Tile size

Set the tile size in Settings → Sub-tools → Quick Access → Quick Access button size. Six sizes from Tiny to XL, useful when you have many shortcuts. Ctrl+Scroll over the panel cycles through sizes inline.

Defaults on first launch

New installs start with two example shelves. The first is a mixed “try these” shelf showing the range of things a tile can be: a website, a one-click pre-filled email, a few Settings deep-links, a couple of built-in apps, and your Downloads and Pictures folders. The second is a launch-argument examples shelf (InPrivate browsing, Network Connections, IP configuration, and so on) so the ARGUMENTS field is easy to discover. That second shelf starts collapsed so you’re not met with a wall of tiles on first launch. Reveal it from the shelf switcher whenever you’re curious. An empty shelf shows a “Drag files, folders or links here, or click +” hint with a + tile until it has its first item. Beyond two shelves (and Run as administrator) are AppRig Pro features.

Sub-tool: Habit Tracker

Custom trackers for the things you want to keep on top of every day, whether that’s a measurement (a number, like weight or hours slept), a count (a tally you bump up, like glasses of water), or a simple yes/no (did you do it today?). In the default tool order the Habit Tracker sits between Timers and Time Tracker.

The docked tile

Your trackers show as compact colour-coded cards that wrap across the tile, matching the Time Tracker’s job buttons. Each card carries the habit’s name and a large round state circle on the left: a plus while the habit is still due today, and a check once you’ve logged it. Once you’ve tracked a habit today its whole card fills with the habit’s own colour (rather than only showing it on a left-edge strip), so the day’s progress reads across the row at a glance. On a day a habit isn’t scheduled its card greys out but stays clickable. Hovering a still-to-do card previews the logged state and shows the current streak.

The + (new tracker) and analysis buttons stack at the top-right beside the cards.

Logging

Click a card to log today’s value: yes/no trackers toggle instantly, while measurement and count trackers open a small editor (count trackers get a +1 button for rapid tapping). Right-click a card to rename it, set its colour, open analysis, add a new tracker, or delete it.

Weekday schedule

Right-click a habit and choose Reminder days… to tick which days of the week it should be tracked. On a day a habit isn’t scheduled its card greys out, but stays clickable. You can still log it (which fills it back in) or right-click to change its days. The daily reminder only counts habits scheduled for today, so it stays quiet on rest days or once today’s habits are done.

Daily reminder

A bell button beside the + lets you pick a time to be reminded to log your habits each day. The bell turns blue while a reminder is set (grey when off), and the same popover has a Clear reminder option. At the set time you get a notification and a count badge appears on the Habit Tracker button in the activity bar (the same style as the clipboard capture counter), showing how many of today’s habits you still have to log; click the button to open the tracker and log them. If you’d turned the Habit Tracker off, it’s brought back into the activity bar so there’s somewhere to log. The reminder only counts habits scheduled for today, is skipped once you’ve logged them all, and clears on its own at midnight.

Analysis window

Open it from a card’s View chart → link or its right-click Open analysis. It charts one tracker’s history with kind-aware views (line / area / dots for measurements, bars / cumulative for counts, calendar heatmap / streak bar for yes/no), a selectable time range (30 / 90 / 365 days / all), a target line where one is set, and current-streak / best-streak / completion-percent stats. It lists past entries with edit and delete, and you can switch which tracker it shows without closing it. Its content follows your global Interface size by default (the toolbar does too), so it’s sized right even if you never zoom; hold Ctrl+Scroll to zoom just the content (S / M / L) as a per-window override. The window remembers its position, size, zoom, pin, and last-shown tracker.

Sub-tool: Time Tracker

A lightweight time tracker. Right-click any job pill and choose Add new job… to create a job (or use the dotted placeholder that appears when you have zero jobs). Click a job pill to start its timer. Click again to stop. Separate tasks within one job are best kept apart with tags rather than separate jobs.

Creating a new job with the same name as one you already have warns you first (“a job called X already exists… add another anyway?”) so a single client’s work doesn’t get split across duplicate jobs by accident.

Each job button (pill) has a round start/stop control on the left, the job name with an inline tag picker beside it, and a single “Today” line carrying the day’s total time and money together (e.g. “4h 11m | $467”; the money is hidden for unpaid / time-only jobs). While a job is running its live session earnings sit next to the running timer and the pill glows green so it stands out at a glance; the time and money figures use a monospace figure for steady alignment. With two or fewer jobs showing, the pills widen to fill the available width. The Pomodoro button sits at the bottom of the panel, below your job buttons; the day-progress bar stays at the top.

Tagging what you’re working on

Use the tag picker on a job’s pill to label what you’re doing within that job, rather than splitting one job into several. Changing the tag on a running session splits it: the time tracked so far is saved under the old tag and a fresh session starts under the new one, so you can switch tasks without stopping and restarting (and without losing the seconds in between). A continuous block that crossed tags shows as adjacent sessions in the list. Picking a different tag within the first few seconds, or re-picking the same tag, just relabels in place; retagging a past session from the Sessions window only relabels it. The Sessions window has a per-tag time-breakdown that shows where your time goes.

Global timer hotkey

Ctrl+Alt+H toggles the most recently active job from anywhere in Windows. Press once to stop a running timer, press again to resume. It only starts a timer while the Time Tracker is on screen (its panel open in the activity bar, or popped out as a window), so it can’t quietly start a background timer for a tool you’ve tucked away. It can always stop a running timer from anywhere (open or hidden), and does nothing when the Time Tracker is turned off in Settings.

Reminder toast

Turn on Remind me if I forget to start tracking in Time Tracker settings. When enabled, AppRig pops a tray toast once per hour if you’re inside your configured work window (default 09:00 to 17:00, weekdays only) and no timer is running. Click the toast to start your most recently used job immediately. The work window hours, weekdays-only flag, and the toggle itself are all configurable in Time Tracker settings.

Hide and show jobs

Hide a finished job’s button from the panel via the pill right-click menu’s Show/Hide jobs submenu. Its sessions and totals stay in the Sessions window. Re-tick to bring it back. The job that’s currently tracking can’t be hidden.

Idle detection

Enable Idle detection in Settings → Sub-tools → Time Tracker. While a timer is running, AppRig watches your keyboard and mouse activity. If you go idle for longer than the threshold (default 10 minutes, configurable 1 to 60 minutes), the moment you come back a prompt asks what to do with the gap:

• Wasn’t a break: leave the session as-is.
• Keep break, new session: truncate the active session to when you went idle and start a fresh one now.
• Keep break, stop tracking: truncate without restarting (good for when you forgot to stop).

Pomodoro

The Pomodoro runs as a side-cycle alongside your time tracking (default 25-minute focus / 5-minute short break / 15-minute long break, long break every 4 cycles). It is on by default; turn it off with Show Pomodoro in Time Tracker window in Settings → Sub-tools → Time Tracker if you don’t use it. The Pomodoro is independent of which job is running: switching jobs never resets the cycle, and stopping a timer never stops the Pomodoro unless you want it to.

When a cycle is active, a small row shows the current phase (Focus / Break / Long break) and a live countdown. Click the row to start or stop the cycle at any time. An auto-start option in settings kicks off the Pomodoro automatically whenever you start a Time Tracker timer (on by default).

Pomodoro durations are customisable in Settings: work block (5 to 90 min), short break (1 to 30 min), long break (5 to 60 min), and cycles before a long break (2 to 8). Changes take effect at the next phase boundary. You can also turn off the “resume” notification if you prefer to self-start breaks.

Pomodoro phase-change toasts (“Pomodoro: break time”, “back to work”, etc.) follow the same rule as the timer toast: clicking opens AppRig and activates the Time Tracker tab so you can see the current phase straight away.

Sessions dialog

Click the day-progress bar at the top of the panel, or the view-sessions button stacked beside the job pills (or right-click any job pill → Today’s sessions…), to open the Sessions dialog. It opens on the Day tab and shows your day’s log and weekly total with a full set of editing tools. The Sessions window and the Time Tracker dialogs follow the font you pick in Settings.

• Edit times inline: click any start or end time to change it.
• Notes: each session row has a note field. Click + note to add one; notes are multi-line (use Shift+Enter for a new line, Enter to commit, Esc to cancel).
• Change job: click a session’s job name or colour stripe to reassign it to a different job.
• Add a session retroactively: click + Add session at the bottom of the day’s list to log time you forgot to track. Defaults to your most recently active job and sensible time bounds.
• Size: the dialog’s content follows your global Interface size by default, so it’s sized right even if you never zoom (the title bar and toolbar follow it too). Hold Ctrl+Scroll to zoom just the content at three stops (S / M / L) as a per-window override; it re-baselines to your Interface size whenever you change that. Matching size buttons in Settings → Sub-tools → Time Tracker also update an open dialog live.

Help mode

Click the ? in the Sessions window title bar and a panel slides out on the right. Hover any area that highlights, then click it to read what it is, why you’d use it, and an example. Press Esc or click ? again to close. Explainable areas include the year heatmap strip, each Overview section (the at-a-glance period cards and the per-job breakdown), and on the Money tab the Add income, Export CSV, and New invoice buttons, the figures, the ledger, and an invoice’s draft / sent / paid status.

Summary tab

The Sessions dialog has five tabs across the top: Summary, Day, Week, Month, Year. Summary is the at-a-glance overview: four large period cards (Today / This week / This month / This year) showing total hours and earnings, plus a per-job breakdown table with Week / Month / Year hours and Month / Year earnings columns. The job rows are sorted by year total so your biggest biller goes on top. Earnings columns only populate for jobs that have a rate set (right-click a job pill → Set rate…). Useful for the “how much did I bill this week?” check without opening a spreadsheet. Today’s totals, your goals, and the session list are free; the week / month / year period cards and the per-job breakdown are AppRig Pro features, shown under an “Unlock with Pro” card for free users (the same as the chart tabs).

Chart views on the Day / Week / Month / Year tabs

Each non-Summary tab carries two chart cards. A small icon picker in the corner of each card cycles that card between the alternate chart views available for the period; the first time you open Time Tracker the picker pulses with an accent glow to advertise that it’s interactive. The full set:

• Day: cumulative growing line with a live-pace projection to midnight; hourly histogram stacked by job.
• Week: punch card (day × hour heat grid); this-week cumulative with last-week ghost line for comparison.
• Month: cumulative line with projection to the last day of the month; day-of-week pattern (Mon to Sun totals); session-length distribution across six buckets.
• Year: the monthly-totals card opens on the Earnings view by default (cumulative dollars to Dec 31, projection in success-green), with Bars, Line, Cumulative hours, a Per job view (one line per job, each showing its running total of hours building up across the months; the colours match the per-job list below; hover a line to see that job’s running total at a month and how much was logged that month, click to pin the card), and a Waterfall view (each month’s earnings stack on the last to build the year total: green bars for months that added to it, red for any net-negative refund month, and a blue Total bar at the end; hover any bar for the month, its contribution, and the running total) a click away. Below that, a year scrapbook of twelve mini month-calendars on its own card.

Filter by job, and track invoiced time

A filter bar sits under the tabs. Pick a single job from the dropdown to scope every chart, stat, and breakdown to that job, or leave it on All for the combined view. Your choice persists across opens.

To track what you have billed, give an Invoiced job an invoiced-through date: filter to it and click Mark invoiced… in the filter bar (it pre-fills with the job’s latest session date; clear the field, or use the Clear button, to remove it). Any session on or before that date counts as invoiced; later time is outstanding.

With a job filtered, the bar shows its invoiced-through date and the amount still outstanding, and the Outstanding only toggle hides already-invoiced time so you see just what is left to bill. The calendar heatmaps (Month, Year, and the Week punch card) paint invoiced days blue and outstanding days green, with a colour key under each; the Week bars and the Day view label invoiced days as well. So the billing workflow is: filter to a client, turn on Outstanding only, read the outstanding total (or export it to CSV), then Mark invoiced through that date.

Rates, currency & Revenue Mode

Right-click a job → Set rate to give it a rate and a currency ($, £, €, ¥, ₹, R$, CHF, kr, ₩, ₺); earnings for that job then show in its own currency throughout the Sessions window. There are two paid job types:

• Hourly rate: paid by the hour, with earnings worked out automatically and no invoicing. Good for steady hourly work where you don’t bill from-to.
• Invoiced: keeps the from-to billing flow for client work: you mark time invoiced through a date and track what’s still outstanding.

If your jobs use different currencies the period totals show a subtotal per currency rather than adding them together. Under Settings → Sub-tools → Time Tracker, Earnings lets you pick a default currency for new jobs and a default hourly rate. New jobs start as Hourly at that rate.

Changing a job’s rate applies from that point on. Past sessions keep the rate they were recorded at, so earnings you’ve already logged don’t change; a raise shows as a steeper climb from today on the cumulative chart. A short note explains this when you change a rate.

A monthly salary is spread evenly across the days of its month rather than landing as a lump on one date, so the Week and Day views (and the earnings chart) show it as a steady amount. An 8,000/month salary reads about 1,866 in each week rather than the whole 8,000 in one week. “This month” and “this year” still total the full salary, and the Money ledger keeps one summary salary row per month.

For work paid by sales rather than the hour (products, YouTube, side hustles), choose No rate: I log sales / revenue in the Set rate dialog. Filtering the Year tab to a no-rate job switches it to Revenue Mode: click the editable Revenue card to log a sale (date, amount, optional note) in a ledger you can edit and delete from. The tab then shows revenue to date, your effective rate (revenue ÷ hours tracked), and a projected year-end total, with the chart stepping up at each logged sale. Logged revenue stays separate from hourly earnings. It is never blended into the rate-based totals.

An Invoicing tab summarises, per Invoiced job, what you have invoiced and what is still outstanding, with a Mark invoiced action and an Outstanding only toggle. Hourly jobs earn from hours but are never billed, so they don’t appear here with an outstanding amount; their earnings still show in every Time view. CSV export includes a currency column. Hourly rates & earnings, invoicing, CSV export, most of the Week / Month / Year analytics, and the Summary tab’s week / month / year period cards and per-job breakdown are AppRig Pro features (though the Month Per job chart and the Year Earnings (projected income) chart are now free for everyone). Free tracking, jobs, today’s sessions and totals, your goals, the session list, and the Day chart are always available too.

Money tab and the ledger

The Money ledger is grouped into foldout sections (Invoiced, Income, and Salaried), newest first within each, with Invoiced on top. Click a section header to fold it away (handy for tucking recurring salary out of the way); each section remembers whether you left it open or closed. Two checkboxes above the ledger let you declutter it: Invoiced only shows just your invoices, hiding every income row (salaried and non-salaried), and Hide paid drops invoices already marked paid.

The CSV export lives on the Money tab as a labelled Export CSV button, right-justified after New invoice. The CSV is UTF-8 with BOM (Excel-friendly) and includes job name, ISO timestamps, duration in minutes, notes, hourly rate, earnings, currency, and an invoiced flag. The current-tab export respects whatever job filter and Outstanding-only toggle you have active, so you can export exactly the unbilled time for one client.

Projection captions on the Month and Year tabs

The cumulative line charts in the Month and Year tabs surface their projection prominently underneath the chart: a 14 pt accent-blue line reading “Projected to {time} by {Mon} {lastDay}” on the Month tab, or “Projected to {time} by Dec 31” on the Year tab. The Year tab’s earnings chart uses the same treatment in success-green: “Projected to {amount} by Dec 31”. A smaller muted line below each carries the qualifier (“Based on month-to-date pace” / “Based on year-to-date pace” / “Hours × per-job rates”). When there isn’t a meaningful projection (early in the period, or no per-job rate set for the earnings chart) the prominent line is hidden and only the qualifier shows.

Re-launching with a session still running

If you closed AppRig (or shut the PC down) while a Time Tracker session was still active, you’ll see a tray toast on the next launch naming the job, when it started, and how long it has been running. Click the toast to bring AppRig back so you can stop, edit, or keep going.

Sub-tool: Colors

A palette picker for grabbing colour values without breaking out a separate tool. Click any swatch to copy its hex value to the clipboard.

Built-in palettes

Three palettes ship by default: Material (the 500-weight series), Tailwind, and Web Safe. These are read-only.

Your own palettes

To save your own colours, click the ⋯ menu at the top of the panel and choose + New palette. Give it a name, then click + Swatch to add a colour (or paste a hex code). You can keep multiple palettes and switch between them from the same menu.

Eyedropper

The Pick button in the top bar opens a screen-wide eyedropper. Click anywhere on screen to capture that pixel’s colour. The picked colour lands in the Recent palette automatically; if you have a custom palette selected, it’s added there too.

Copy as

Right-click any swatch and choose Copy as to copy the colour in a specific format: Hex, RGB, HSL, HSV, RGBA, or CSS variable (paste-ready as --my-color: #RRGGBB;). RGB and HSL values are wrapped in CSS syntax so they drop straight into a stylesheet.

WCAG contrast checker

Right-click any swatch and choose Check contrast… to open a draggable contrast checker. Set a foreground and background colour (from quick-picks, any swatch in the current palette, a typed hex, or the native Windows colour picker) and the dialog shows the WCAG 2.1 contrast ratio with pass/fail badges for AA and AAA at both normal and large text sizes. A live preview shows sample text in the foreground on the background, and a swap button flips the two colours. The dialog is modeless: leave it open while you browse other palettes. Pin it with the pin toggle to keep it above other windows.

Sub-tool: Mixer

Per-app audio sliders for everything currently playing audio on your system. The top tile controls your system master output; below it, one tile per app (Spotify, Chrome, your DAW, etc.).

Adjusting volume

• Drag the slider on a tile to set a level. Grab it anywhere along the rail: the handle jumps to where you click and then follows your mouse for the rest of the drag, and the filled part of the rail runs right up to the handle.
• Scroll the wheel over a tile to nudge it up or down.
• Click the speaker icon on a tile to mute or unmute that source.

Apps appear and disappear from the Mixer as they start and stop playing.

Microphone row

Above the System volume section, a microphone row gives you a master input-level slider with a mute button, labelled with your current input device’s name. Click the device name to pick which microphone is the system default input device. The row is hidden when no microphone is present.

System volume row

The master System volume row is labelled with your current output device’s name (rather than the literal text “System volume”). Long names truncate, with the full name shown on hover.

Switching output device

Click the device name on the System volume row to open a list of your active output devices, with the current default checkmarked. Pick one to make it the system default; the per-app sliders re-bind to the newly selected device automatically.

Master tile and fold

The System volume row has a chevron that folds or expands the per-app list below it. Collapsed (the default) keeps the panel compact while still giving you the master control. Expand when you need fine-grained per-app control. The fold state persists across sessions.

Per-app output device

Send an individual app’s audio to a specific output device. Route Spotify to your speakers while Discord stays on your headset, for example. Expand the per-app list and each app’s row shows a headphones button to the right of its speaker icon; click it to pick the device, or choose Default (follow system) to clear the override. The button is grey while the app follows the system default and turns blue once you have routed it somewhere specific. It only appears when you have more than one output device.

A new route takes effect the next time the app starts audio. Already-playing audio may need a track change or an app restart to move. Routes persist across restarts: AppRig writes them to the same place Windows’ own per-app sound settings live, so the two always agree.

Logarithmic volume

In Settings → Sub-tools → Mixer, turn on Logarithmic volume slider to use a perceived-loudness curve. The midpoint of the slider then feels like “half as loud” rather than mapping to 87% actual amplitude, giving you finer control at low volumes. Audio output is unchanged at 0% and 100%; the difference is felt in the middle of the range.

Bluetooth audio keep-awake

Wireless headphones often power down their audio link after a few seconds of silence, which clips the start of the next sound you play. Turn on Keep Bluetooth audio awake and AppRig holds a silent, sub-audible stream open so playback starts cleanly every time. It is off by default and stays on across restarts once enabled; it uses a little more battery while active.

Two ways to toggle it: the tray icon’s right-click menu, or a small Bluetooth glyph that appears on the System volume row whenever your default output is a Bluetooth device. The glyph is dim when off and lit in the accent colour when on, and is hidden when your output is not a Bluetooth device.

Sub-tool: Brightness

Per-monitor screen brightness control. Built-in laptop panels and external monitors that support DDC/CI are detected automatically. Monitors that weren’t fully ready at launch appear automatically the next time you open the panel. No restart needed.

Adjusting brightness

• Drag the slider on a monitor’s tile. Grab it anywhere along the rail: the handle jumps to where you click and then follows your mouse for the rest of the drag.
• Scroll the wheel over a tile to nudge it.
• Click the sun icon at the end of a slider to jump that monitor to full brightness; the All monitors sun sets every monitor to 100%.
• Brightness changes made via Windows are reflected in AppRig live (for built-in panels).

Master tile (multi-monitor)

When more than one monitor is detected, an All monitors master tile appears at the top. Drag it or scroll the wheel over it to shift every monitor’s brightness by the same amount. Differences between monitors are preserved (e.g. if your external is at 80 and your laptop is at 30, both shift together). The master tile has a chevron to fold the per-monitor list when you just want the master control.

The master is fully reversible even when individual monitors clamp at 0 or 100. Push the master toward maximum and any monitor that would go above 100% holds its “virtual” position internally; pull the master back down and the original spacing between monitors is recovered exactly. Touch any individual tile to re-anchor. That monitor’s virtual position resets to where you put it, so fine-tuning a single screen mid-rebalance doesn’t surprise you on the next master move.

Brightness persistence

Each monitor’s last brightness level is saved automatically as you adjust it and re-applied on the next AppRig launch (alongside the existing per-monitor alias and calibration ceiling). Heads-up: if you nudged brightness via OEM function keys between sessions, AppRig’s saved value will win on the next start.

Calibrating per-monitor maximum brightness

Some external monitors report a DDC maximum of 100 but their panel saturates earlier. Right-click a monitor’s name → Calibrate max brightness…, then drag the slider up until the panel stops getting brighter and click Save. AppRig remaps that monitor’s slider so 100% on screen corresponds to your calibrated ceiling, giving you the full range across the panel’s actual usable span. Calibration is saved per monitor and survives reconnects.

Time-of-day auto-adjust

In Settings → Sub-tools → Brightness, turn on Auto-adjust by time of day to ramp brightness on a daily schedule. There are two configurable transitions: a “brighten” time (default 06:30 → 100%) and a “dim” time (default 20:00 → 30%). At each transition the brightness fades smoothly to the target value and then holds steady until the next transition. Closer to sunrise/sunset than a continuous day-long ramp.

The fade duration is configurable from 5 to 120 minutes (default 30, in 5-minute steps), so you can pick a quick fade or a slow Night-Light-style ramp. The schedule applies to every detected monitor, scaled into each panel’s own range. Off by default.

Adjusting brightness by hand switches the schedule off (so it no longer snaps your value back on the next tick); re-enable it any time from Brightness settings. Built-in laptop panels that don’t expose their range via DDC are still adjusted via WMI.

The first DDC/CI call on some external monitors is slow (the protocol can take several seconds to wake the display). AppRig pre-warms this in the background at startup so the panel is responsive when you open it.

Sub-tool: Timers

Run any number of named countdown timers and stopwatches in parallel. The spawn row sits below the running tiles so you scan what’s already going first:

• Four preset chips on the left half (5 min, 10 min, 30 min, 1 hour), each spawn a countdown of that duration with one click.
• ▴ stopwatch on the right half spawns a count-up from 00:00.

Spawned tiles stack into a two-column body above the spawn row: timers on the left, stopwatches on the right. Each tile is auto-numbered on spawn (Timer 1, Stopwatch 1, …).

Tile shapes & states

Timers show a circular progress ring that depletes as the countdown runs; stopwatches show only the play/pause glyph (no ring). A centred play / pause / check glyph reflects what clicking the tile will do.

The tile colour reflects state: blue while running, amber when a timer is under 30 seconds remaining, green when finished, grey when paused. The state dot pulses faster as a timer approaches zero, and the running state dot wears a soft blue halo so a glance at the panel tells you what’s active.

Interacting with tiles

• Click anywhere on a tile to pause / resume. Clicking a finished timer restarts it.
• Click the restart icon (↻) in the tile to re-arm a timer to its saved duration or reset a stopwatch to 00:00. The tile’s name is preserved, so a user-named “10 min standup” preset is reusable.
• Click the × in the top-right of a tile to dismiss it.
• Click the name to rename it in place.
• Click the time on a timer to edit its duration: 25m, 1h30m, 90s, 1:30, or a bare number (interpreted as minutes).

Stopwatches keep deciseconds visible in both running and paused states, so the sub-second precision you stopped at isn’t lost.

Tile zoom

Ctrl+Scroll over a tile cycles tile size through Small / Medium / Large, matching the Time Tracker pills. The chosen size persists per sub-tool. The timer text also scales with the global Interface size (Settings → Window) on top of the tile size.

Done notification

When a countdown reaches zero, AppRig fires a Windows tray toast titled Timer done with the tile’s name, so you don’t have to be looking at the panel to notice. Stopwatches never toast. They don’t have a zero to hit. The tile itself also flashes green as the in-panel “done” signal. Clicking the toast brings AppRig to the front and activates the Timers tab on the action bar, so you land directly on the timer that just finished.

Panel layout

The panel collapses to just the spawn row when no tiles exist, and grows upward as tiles are added. Past five rows it inner-scrolls instead of pushing the rest of the window.

Heads-up: no persistence in v1

Running timers stop when AppRig closes.

Sub-tool: Rename

Batch-rename files in a single folder with a stack of ordered rules and a live preview.

Picking a folder

• Browse button or drop a folder onto the path field.
• Include subfolders toggle to recurse.
• Glob filter field (*.jpg, *.{png,jpg}, IMG_*) with a live match count.
• Manual refresh button; the file list also auto-refreshes when AppRig regains focus.

Rule types

Six rule types stack top-to-bottom and apply in order:

• Remove: strip a substring or pattern.
• Add prefix / Add suffix.
• Replace: plain-text find-and-replace.
• Number: insert sequential numbers via # placeholders (e.g. photo-### starting at 5 produces photo-005, photo-006, …). When the pattern has no #, the engine auto-appends a 2-digit number so a rule like “image” yields image01, image02, … rather than collapsing every file to the same literal.
• Case: six styles: lower, UPPER, kebab-case, snake_case, camelCase, PascalCase.

One rule is pre-added on launch. Add more via the New rule dashed-outline row below the list. Reorder rules with the ⇡/⇣ buttons or by dragging.

Preview & conflicts

The preview list shows the first few results with inline diffs (added segments in green, removed in faint red-strike), plus a + N more truncation row past the visible cap. Conflicts are flagged at preview time:

• Internal: two files would resolve to the same name.
• Existing file: the target name already exists on disk.
• Invalid name: forbidden characters, empty, or dot-only.

Apply is disabled until conflicts are resolved, or check Skip conflicting files to apply the rest.

Apply & undo

Apply commits the batch atomically. The first failure rolls back every preceding rename. Case-only renames (Photo.JPG → photo.jpg) go through a temp swap so the case-insensitive filesystem doesn’t reject them.

The Undo last rename button after a successful apply reverses the most recent batch. Undo is in-memory only (not persisted across restart) and holds up to 10 entries; the oldest is evicted as new applies happen.

Panel zoom

Ctrl+Scroll inside the panel cycles whole-panel zoom through S / M / L / XL; Ctrl+0 resets to Medium. A matching Panel size row in Settings → Sub-tools → Rename mirrors the level. The whole panel scales proportionally, and the strip expands to keep the full content visible at the new size until the host window runs out of room.

Folder path, subfolders toggle, filter, and panel zoom level persist across launches. Rules and the undo stack don’t.

Sub-tool: Convert

Batch image conversion between JPG, PNG, WebP, BMP, GIF, TIFF, TGA, and QOI. All eight are accepted as input and available as output. TGA suits game-dev textures and QOI is a fast lossless format (the quality slider hides for both since they are lossless). Drop files or a folder onto the panel; subfolder enumeration is optional.

Output format

• Format picker for the output type.
• Quality slider for JPG / WebP outputs.
• Lossless toggle for PNG / WebP.

Resize (optional)

Three modes: Fit within (shrink-only: cap the longest edge but never enlarge), Exact size (specific width × height, may enlarge), and Percentage. Each mode has a tooltip spelling out the exact behaviour. Maintain-aspect-ratio toggle and quick preset chips (1080p, 720p, thumb 256, 50%) are alongside. A Presets dropdown fills the width and height with a common social size (Instagram post / portrait / story, Facebook post / cover, YouTube thumbnail, X header, LinkedIn banner), switching to Exact mode and keeping aspect.

Where output goes

Three destinations: Same folder, Subfolder of source, or Pick a folder. A suffix / prefix pattern customises the output filenames. Tick Open folder when done next to the Convert button to have the output folder open automatically once a batch finishes.

Conflict handling

If a planned output filename already exists, Auto-rename (the default) appends the target dimensions to the name (for example screenshot_1280x720.jpg) to disambiguate. If even that collides, it falls back to numeric suffixes. This lets you re-run with different settings without overwriting earlier output, or having to clear and start over. Skip and Overwrite remain available as alternatives.

Settings-change auto-reset

After a batch completes, tweaking any output / resize / destination setting brings the Convert button back automatically, so re-running with different settings is one click.

Running a batch

The batch is cancellable and shows per-file progress. The results summary has a Convert again button to re-run the same images with the same settings (no need to change a setting or re-add the files), lets you retry just the failed jobs in one click, and opens the output folder for quick inspection.

Panel zoom

Ctrl+Scroll inside the panel cycles whole-panel zoom through S / M / L / XL; Ctrl+0 resets to Medium. A matching Panel size row in Settings → Sub-tools → Convert mirrors the level.

Sub-tool: QR Code

Turn any text or URL into a QR code. The code renders live as you type (after a brief debounce), so you can paste a link, a wifi config, or a vCard and watch the code update. Multi-line input is accepted.

Error correction & size

• Error-correction selector (L / M / Q / H). Higher levels survive more damage or logo overlay at the cost of a denser code.
• Export size (Small / Medium / Large / Extra / Huge). The exact pixel resolution shows in the size control’s tooltip. Because QR modules must be whole pixels, the actual size lands on the nearest clean value to your target.

Shapes

• Module shape: icon chips for Square, Rounded, Dot, Triangle, Diamond, Hexagon, Plus, and Star.
• Anchor shape: the three finder patterns in the corners can be drawn as Square, Rounded, Circle, or Leaf, each rendered as a matching ring plus centre pip.

Inverted & transparent

Turn on Invert for white modules on a dark background. Turn on Transparent to export with no white quiet-zone halo. The preview shows a faint checkerboard so you can tell the background is see-through at a glance.

Copy & save

A small toolbar above the preview has Copy (copies the code as an image; the Clipboard sub-tool ignores this round-trip so it doesn’t clutter your history) and Save (writes a PNG). The whole renderer is pure managed code with no network calls and no telemetry.

Sub-tool: Mouse Highlighter

A cursor halo that follows the mouse on screen, for screen-shares, demos, and recordings where the audience needs to see what you’re pointing at. The OS cursor stays on top of the highlight; AppRig never replaces or hides it. v1 covers the primary monitor only.

Toggling the overlay

Two equivalent ways to switch it on and off:

• Press Ctrl+Shift+H (the default) from anywhere in Windows. You don’t need to focus AppRig first.
• Click the Highlighter master toggle at the top of the sub-tool card, useful while you’re discovering the feature or if the hotkey is bound elsewhere.

Hiding the Mouse Highlighter tab in the activity bar also releases the hotkey, freeing Ctrl+Shift+H for other apps. Bring the tab back and the hotkey re-registers. If the highlighter was on when you hid the tab, re-enabling restores it instead of starting it off.

Turn on Keep running when hidden in the card to let the overlay stay active even after you hide its tab, so it runs without taking up space in the window; a small green dot on the tab shows the overlay is live while hidden. The card itself can be collapsed to a single header line with the chevron in its top-right corner (click again to expand), and the collapsed state is remembered.

Style

Three styles, picked via chips along the top of the card. Each chip renders a tiny live preview in the currently-selected colour, so the row reads at a glance; tooltips name them if you need confirmation.

• Glow: a soft radial gradient that fades outward (default).
• Ring: a thin outlined circle with a soft halo.
• Crosshair: four line segments plus an inner ring, for precision demos.

Colour, opacity, size

• Six colour swatches spread evenly across the card width: blue, purple, green, amber (default), red, teal. Drawn from the same palette as the list colours so they sit naturally next to the rest of the app.
• Opacity slider from 0% to 100%.
• Size slider from 16 px to 160 px.

The sliders all respond to the mouse wheel the same way the Brightness and Mixer sliders do.

Click flash

With Click flash on, an expanding ring pulses outward from the cursor on every left-click, useful when you’re talking through a click on a recording. Toggle it on or off in the card.

Dim when idle

Dim when idle fades the halo to 30% opacity if the cursor sits still for two seconds, then ramps it back up the moment you move. Off by default; turn it on if the static halo is distracting between gestures.

Sub-tool: Keystroke Display

An on-screen overlay that shows the keys you press, for screen-sharing, tutorials, demos, and recordings where the audience can’t see your keyboard. The overlay is click-through, never steals focus, and is hidden from Alt-Tab.

Toggling the overlay

Press Ctrl+Shift+K (the default) from anywhere in Windows to switch the overlay on and off. The sub-tool’s card carries a master toggle too. If the overlay was active when you hid the tab or disabled the sub-tool in Settings, re-enabling restores it rather than leaving it off.

Turn on Keep running when hidden in the card to let the overlay stay active even after you hide its tab, so it keeps showing your keystrokes without taking up space in the window; a small green dot on the tab shows it’s live while hidden. The card can also be collapsed to a single header line with the chevron in its top-right corner, and the collapsed state is remembered.

Display styles

Three styles, picked via chips in the card. Each presents the keys a different way:

• Caption: a single subtitle-style line that rewrites itself in place as you type, with a blinking caret. Plain typing flows into the line; shortcuts and named keys (Ctrl+S, Esc, F5, arrows) appear as inline keycaps; Backspace deletes and Enter starts a fresh line.
• Single: the latest key only, rendered as a large hero chip with a spring scale-in animation on each press.
• Pill: keys shown on a solid, rounded translucent background panel, for clear contrast against busy screens.

Stack

Turn on Stack to pile a vertical history of recent keystrokes onto whichever style you’ve chosen, instead of showing only the latest. Entries stack oldest at the top and newest at the bottom (so it reads top-to-bottom), with older entries fading. With the Caption style, Stack keeps your previous lines as a short transcript above the current one and wraps long lines onto new lines as you type; with Pill the pile sits inside the background panel.

How keys are rendered

Modifier keys appear as Windows-native text (Ctrl, Alt, Win); Shift, Enter, Backspace, Tab, and Space use universal glyphs so they read across languages.

Shortcuts-only

Turn on Shortcuts only to suppress plain typing and render only chords that include Ctrl, Alt, or Win. Handy when you’re demonstrating a shortcut-heavy workflow and don’t want the overlay flooded with every letter you type.

Colour, opacity, font size

• Six colour swatches from the standard palette (blue, purple, green, amber, red, teal).
• Opacity slider from 0% to 100%.
• Font size slider from 14 px to 120 px, for larger displays and recordings.

Position on screen

The position picker combines two controls:

• A 3×3 anchor grid that snaps the overlay to a corner, an edge midpoint, or screen centre.
• Per-axis X and Y offset sliders (0 to 200 px) that nudge the overlay inward from the chosen anchor, so you can park it in a spare corner of your stream layout without overlapping the OBS chrome.

Sub-tool: Clock

A grid of world-clock and sunrise/sunset widgets, each tied to a place. In the default tool order the Clock sits between Convert and the Time Tracker in the action bar.

World and Local views

A World / Local toggle flips the tool between two modes:

• World: a grid of places, each shown as its own clock. The clocks sit at the top of the tool rather than spreading out to fill the height.
• Local: one large clock for your own location, with the date and a sunrise-to-sunset arc beneath it.

Clock faces

Each clock renders as digital or analog, with a day / night cue and an “offset from you” chip so you can see at a glance how far ahead or behind a place is.

Adding and arranging places

• Add a place from the built-in city search. The box shows a City.. hint so it’s clear what to type. Sunrise and sunset are computed on-device, with no network request.
• Drag World cells to reorder them.
• Right-click the local clock to choose which parts to show (the face, the date, the sunrise-sunset arc, and so on).

Settings and zoom

Clock settings live under Settings → Sub-tools → Clock: a 24-hour time toggle and a show seconds toggle. Hold Ctrl+Scroll over the local clock to zoom it across a wide range, large enough to turn off everything but the face for a big wall-clock look. The world-clock view zooms over its normal range.

Sub-tool: System Monitor

Live readouts of how your PC is performing: CPU, memory, disk space, disk activity, GPU, VRAM, and monitor refresh rate, with an optional network-throughput readout and top-processes list. It is on by default in the action bar.

Choosing what to show

• Every metric is individually toggleable from the gear menu (or right-click on the readouts). The chooser matches the look of the app’s other dropdowns.
• Pick a compact rows layout or a cards layout. Disk space and the top-processes list show their full lists in the cards layout too, not just in rows.
• Metrics your PC can’t report are hidden automatically and shown as unavailable in the menu.

What the metrics show

• CPU, GPU, memory, VRAM, and network each draw a live history graph. VRAM shows real usage: the dedicated VRAM in use out of the card’s dedicated VRAM.
• Refresh rate lists every connected display with its own Hz (for example “Display 1 144 Hz”, “Display 2 60 Hz”).
• Top processes lists the busiest processes, and network shows current throughput.

When it runs

The monitor updates only while it’s open. Collapsing or hiding the tool stops all monitoring, so it does no background work when you’re not looking at it. Popped out into its own window, it keeps updating even while the docked tile is hidden.

Position and zoom

Right-click the System Monitor’s side toolbar to move the tool between the top and bottom tool areas. Ctrl+Scroll zooms only the readouts; the side toolbar stays a constant size and follows your Interface size setting instead.

Sub-tool popouts

Any sub-tool can pop out as its own floating window, the same way notes and lists do. Three ways to trigger it: right-click the sub-tool’s icon on the activity bar and pick Pop out, Alt+click the icon, or Alt+click anywhere on the tile’s body in the main window. The icon’s strip slot collapses (neighbouring tools reflow up) and the tool appears in a separate window with its own title bar, pin button, and minimise / close controls. Popping out also auto-activates the tab, so when you later close the popout the inline tile reliably reappears.

Pin, position, persistence

• Pin the popout to keep it always-on-top, independently of the main workspace pin.
• Position, size, and pin state persist per sub-tool, so the popout opens at the same place and size next time.
• Reopens on next launch if you had it open at shutdown.

Re-docking

To put a popped-out sub-tool back in the strip, either right-click its activity-bar icon and pick Re-dock, or just close the popout window.

Independent top-level windows

Popped-out sub-tools, lists, and cards are independent top-level windows. They no longer jump in front of other apps when you click the main window, and each one’s pin (always-on-top) is its own, independent of the main window’s. To bring the whole workspace forward together, use the show/hide hotkey (Ctrl+Alt+S) or the tray icon; that also hides and restores every floating window alongside the main one.

Restored when you switch workspaces

Switching to a saved workspace restores its floating windows too: popped-out sub-tool panels, list windows, and sticky note cards reopen at the positions and sizes saved with that workspace, and any floating windows the target layout didn’t include are closed. Switching still discards unsaved tweaks to the current layout. Use the Update '<current>' menu item to bank them first.

Keep Awake

A “caffeine pill” for stopping the PC going to sleep or turning off the screen without touching Windows Power Settings. Useful for long renders, compilations, downloads, presentations, or watching a long video without nudging the mouse.

How to use it

Right-click the tray icon and open the Keep awake submenu (just above Quit). Pick one of four modes:

• Off: release the lock.
• Indefinitely: stays awake until you pick Off or quit AppRig.
• For 1 hour: auto-releases after 60 minutes. The submenu label updates with the remaining time (“For 1 hour. 42m left”) so you can check how long you have without setting a separate timer.
• Until tracked Session ends: rides the Time Tracker sub-tool. While a Time Tracker session is running, Keep Awake stays on; stop the timer and Keep Awake releases too. If no job is currently tracking when you click this option, it’s a silent no-op (AppRig won’t engage a mode that would immediately self-disable).

The currently-selected mode has a checkmark in the submenu, and the parent Keep awake label changes to show the active mode inline. So you can read the state without expanding the menu. The tray icon tooltip also updates to “AppRig · keep awake. Nm left” while active.

What it actually does

AppRig calls the Win32 SetThreadExecutionState API with the standard system-required + display-required flags. No driver, no background service, no permissions prompt. When you pick Off, quit AppRig, or the 1-hour timer expires, the flags are cleared and Windows resumes its normal sleep behaviour. There’s no risk of leaving the system pinned awake after AppRig is gone.

Heads-up: some laptops bypass the display-required flag when you close the lid (the OS treats lid-close as an explicit “sleep now” intent). Keep Awake can’t override that.

Settings

Open Settings from the tray menu. The settings window is grouped around what each setting acts on, in this sidebar order: Window, Notes & lists, Sub-tools, Theme, Storage, Shortcuts, About. Each registered sub-tool also appears as an indented entry under Sub-tools, so you can jump straight to its own settings page.

Window

How AppRig launches and appears on your desktop.

• Interface size (S / M / L) scales the whole app together: list titles, buttons and card chrome, and every sub-tool’s text and readouts (Time Tracker, Habit Tracker, Colors, Keystroke Display, Mouse Highlighter, Mixer, Timers, QR, Converter, Rename, System Monitor) all move with it. Medium is the comfortable default. Each size button previews itself, so you can see the effect before picking. Hold Ctrl and scroll over your notes to zoom just the note text on top of this, and Ctrl+0 to reset it to the current Interface size.
• Start AppRig with Windows adds or removes the auto-start entry.
• Tray-only mode hides the main window from the taskbar entirely. Reach it via the tray icon or the global show/hide hotkey.
• Hover-corner peek-through hides the window when the cursor reaches the top-right corner so you can click apps behind it. A small dot stays as a visual anchor. With the master toggle on you get three further options: a Peek hides unpinned windows too toggle (which hides your unpinned floating windows alongside the main window, while pinned ones stay on screen), an auto-restore distance slider (50 to 2000 px, default 500) and an Auto-restore when cursor moves away toggle. With auto-restore off, the dot acts as a switch: hover it again to bring the window back, or use the show/hide hotkey or tray icon.
• Window recovery holds two buttons. Recover main window places the home window at a known-good size near the primary monitor’s top-left, and Reset all sticky positions clears saved sticky-note positions. Useful after unplugging a monitor or changing display scaling.

Notes & lists

How notes and lists behave, how they’re displayed, and the reminder and notification controls. (This single tab replaces the former separate “Notes” and “Cards & lists” pages.)

• Behavior: Click to edit swaps the default click-to-cycle for click-to-edit; New card opens as floating note sends new cards out as stickies instead of opening inline; Confirm before deleting adds a confirmation step.
• Display: Show card count on list titles and Card preview lines (3 / 5 / 7 / 10 / 15 / 20 / 25). Text and interface sizing now live in one Interface size control under Window (it replaced the separate note-text, list-header and icon-size pickers).
• Reminders & notifications: the master Reminders enabled switch, snooze duration, quick-pick weekday, and the notification-sound setting, all described under the Reminders & due dates section above.

Sub-tools

Sits below Notes & lists, and only visible when one or more sub-tools are registered. The Sub-tools header opens the overview page; clicking a sub-tool name in the sidebar opens that sub-tool’s own settings.

• Activity bar position places the bar at the top or the bottom of the window.
• Per sub-tool: drag handle, Enable toggle, and Anchor (top or bottom of the notes area). Sub-tools whose UI is anchored intrinsically (Clipboard) only show the enable toggle.
• Each sub-tool’s own settings page lives at Sub-tools → (sub-tool name) in the sidebar.

Disabling a sub-tool now fully stops its background work: the Brightness auto-adjust ramp, the Time Tracker toggle hotkey, and the Time Tracker Pomodoro / idle-detection / reminder background tasks all pause while the sub-tool is off, and resume when you re-enable it.

Theme

Theme and font.

• Theme picks from Dark, Light, Blue, Sepia, Sepia Soft, and OLED. Sepia is a warm paper-toned light theme and Sepia Soft is a dimmer variant of it for low-light reading; OLED uses a true-black background for OLED panels. Changing the theme restarts AppRig and reopens the Theme tab so you can see the result immediately.
• Match colours remaps all your list colours to the nearest swatch in the active theme’s palette in one step.
• Font picks from twelve common system fonts (Segoe UI, Cascadia Code, JetBrains Mono, Georgia, Calibri, Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Trebuchet, Times, Courier, Comic). The Interface size picker lives under Window; the Quick Access button-size picker lives under Sub-tools → Quick Access.

Storage

• Database location shows the current path. Three buttons: Move data to… (relocate the current database), Open existing database… (point at a database on disk, e.g. a backup), Create new database… (start fresh in a new folder).
• Your AppRig databases lists every database AppRig knows about. The active one sits at the top with an “Active” label and a coloured outline; previous locations sit below. Each non-active row has two buttons: Switch hops AppRig to that database immediately (no confirm dialog needed; the row shows the path and size you’re switching to), and Delete removes the file from disk along with any WAL / journal companions.
• After moving, creating, or switching databases, AppRig restarts and reopens Settings on the Storage page so you can verify the change immediately. The previous database file is left in place. Delete it from the list above whenever you no longer need it.

Shortcuts

Hotkeys and mouse shortcuts.

• Global show / hide hotkey and Quick add hotkey can be rebound by pressing a combination then Enter. Esc cancels, Delete clears (no hotkey). Defaults are Ctrl+Alt+S and Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S.
• Other shortcuts is a read-only reference list of mouse and scroll-wheel gestures.

About

Current version. While AppRig is in pre-release, a dev-build banner sits below the version with a one-click Submit feedback link that opens a short form. Below that: the AppRig website (documentation and other tools), Discord (community, feature requests, bug reports), privacy policy, and copyright.

Keyboard & mouse shortcuts

Inside cards (edit mode)

On cards (view mode)

Anywhere in the app

Workspace search

Clipboard

Time Tracker

Inside the Quick Access panel

Inside the Timers panel

Inside the Time Tracker or Colors panel

Inside the Rename or Convert panel

Sessions dialog (Time Tracker)

Sub-tool sliders (Mixer / Brightness)

Storage & backup

Where your AppRig data lives

By default, everything sits in a single SQLite database at:

%APPDATA%\AppRig\notes.db

You can move it anywhere via Settings → Storage → Move data to… and AppRig will continue using the new location. The database holds your notes, lists, sticky positions, clipboard history, time entries, colour palettes, and per-sub-tool settings.

Backing up to the cloud

To keep an automatic off-site backup, point the database location at a folder synced by OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or your sync provider of choice. Every save is replicated by your provider in the background.

Note: when the database lives in a synced folder, your data is subject to that provider’s terms and storage. AppRig itself does no syncing.

Restoring on a new machine

Install AppRig on the new machine, then use Settings → Storage → Open existing database… to point at the database file from your backup or synced folder. AppRig will treat that file as your live store from then on.

Switching between several databases

AppRig remembers every database location you’ve used. The Storage page in Settings shows all of them as a list, with the active one labelled and outlined. Click Switch on any other row to hop AppRig to that database (one click, no confirm dialog needed), useful for separating work and personal data, or quickly testing a backup. Delete removes a previous database file from disk together with its WAL / journal sidecars; the active database is never offered for deletion.

Starting fresh in a new location

Use Create new notes here… to open an empty database in a folder of your choice (e.g. a separate work-vs-personal split).

Privacy

AppRig is a local-first app. It makes no network connections, collects no telemetry, and sends nothing off your machine.

• All notes, lists, settings, clipboard history, and sub-tool data live in a single SQLite database on your own disk.
• Crash logs are written locally to %APPDATA%\AppRig\crash.log and never transmitted.
• The Clipboard sub-tool captures clipboard text and images locally only. Reputable password managers can opt out of capture via standard Win32 clipboard formats; AppRig honours them.
• Updates are distributed via the Microsoft Store; AppRig does not check for updates itself.

For the full statement see the privacy policy shipped with the application or on the AppRig website.

Open-source libraries

AppRig bundles a number of open-source libraries, including:

• QRCoder (MIT License): https://github.com/codebude/QRCoder
• SixLabors.ImageSharp (Apache 2.0 License): https://github.com/SixLabors/ImageSharp
• NAudio (MIT License): https://github.com/naudio/NAudio

AppRig also bundles the following fonts under the SIL Open Font License 1.1: OpenDyslexic, Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, and JetBrains Mono.

The full open-source notices and complete licence texts for every bundled library and font ship inside the application (open Settings, go to the About section, and click “Open licenses” under Legal). The same notices are published on the AppRig open-source licenses page.