ChronoDesk

A small, transparent always-on-top clock for the Windows desktop, styled after studio and trading-floor hardware clocks: a clock, a stopwatch, a countdown timer and a world market board that shows which stock exchanges are open right now.

Download for Windows · Website · All releases

• Market board: local time and trading status for nine exchanges from New York to Sydney, with a countdown to the next open or close. Computed on your PC, with no network and no account.
• Clock and timers: a second time zone after the date, a one-shot alarm, and a Pomodoro cycle on the timer.
• Hardware looks: three faces (dot-matrix and seven-segment LEDs, or a plain typeface), eight colour presets, a studio seconds ring with sixty LEDs and an optional dark backdrop.
• Stays out of the way: click-through lock with hotkeys that still reach it, night dimming, a chroma-key background for streaming, and a stopwatch or timer that survives a reboot.
• Light: one ~5.8 MB exe, ~50 MB RAM, one frame per second when idle. No admin rights, no telemetry.

Windows 10 and 11 only for now.

Install

Download from the latest release:

• ChronoDesk-Setup.exe installs the app for your user in %LOCALAPPDATA%\ChronoDesk, adds a Start menu shortcut and an entry under Installed apps, and starts it. No administrator rights needed.
• ChronoDesk.exe is the same program as a portable exe: run it from anywhere, nothing is installed.

The exes are not code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen may warn the first time. Choose More info → Run anyway. SHA256SUMS.txt in the release lists their checksums.

To uninstall, use Settings → Apps → Installed apps, or run chronodesk.exe --uninstall. Your settings in %APPDATA%\chronodesk are left in place.

Updates

Once a day ChronoDesk asks GitHub whether there is a newer release, sending nothing but its name and version. When there is, the tray icon gets a green dot and the menu offers Update to ChronoDesk x.y.z now: one click downloads it, checks its signature and installs it, keeping your settings. Nothing downloads until you click, and the portable exe opens the release page instead. Check for updates in the menu shows which version you have and checks straight away. To turn the daily check off, set check_updates: false in the settings file.

Using it

Right-click the overlay or the tray icon to open the menu. Everything can be set from there.

Action	How
Move	Drag with the left mouse button
Lock (click-through)	Left-click the tray icon. The icon turns amber while locked, and a second click unlocks
Switch mode	Menu, or 1 Clock, 2 Stopwatch, 3 Timer, 4 Markets
Start/pause, reset	Hover the stopwatch or timer, or click the overlay and press Space / R
From any window	Ctrl+Alt+Shift with Space, R, 1–4, or L to lock and unlock. Works while locked; switch off under Global hotkeys
Timer duration	Menu → Timer duration, or scroll over a stopped timer
Alarm	Menu → Alarm: pick the hour and minute, or switch it on and off
Start with Windows	Menu → Start with Windows

When a countdown finishes, the digits blink for half a minute and the Windows notification sound plays three times; Restart runs it again. A running stopwatch or timer carries on after a restart or a reboot.

Timer duration → Pomodoro cycle turns the timer into four focus periods, with a short break after each of the first three and a long one after the fourth (5 and 15 minutes at 25-minute focus; they scale with other durations). A finished period waits for Start. Reset restarts the period, and pressed again, the whole cycle.

The alarm rings once, at the next time the clock shows the hour and minute you picked: three chimes ten seconds apart and a blinking frame. A click, a key or any menu choice silences it. If the PC is asleep or the overlay is closed at that moment, it does not ring late.

Under Appearance you can change the size, the face (typeface, seven-segment or dot matrix), the eight colour presets, the 12/24-hour format, the date line, the seconds ring, the backdrop and night mode, which dims the readout on a schedule.

Second time zone adds another city's time after the date, such as "TOKYO 03:30 +1", marked when its date differs from yours. Chroma key background fills the window with pure green for streaming software; the green presets are then drawn in white, since the keyer would remove them too.

Every combination of face, colour, ring and backdrop is on the website.

Market board

The Markets mode shows one row per exchange with its local time and a status dot: green while trading, amber during a lunch break, hollow when closed. The line underneath says what happens next, such as "London closes in 1h 45m".

The built-in exchanges are New York, London, Oslo, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Sydney. The board starts with New York, London, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Tokyo; choose which ones to show under Exchanges, where you can also put the board on one line and show exchange codes (NYSE, LSE, OSE…) instead of city names.

Opening hours are regular weekday sessions, including lunch breaks, with daylight saving time handled for each region. Public holidays and half days are not included, so on a holiday the board will show an exchange as open.

Configuration

Settings are saved to %APPDATA%\chronodesk\data\app.ron, a plain text file that can be edited by hand while the app is closed. Set the CHRONODESK_CONFIG environment variable to use a different file. If a value is invalid, that one setting falls back to its default and the rest are kept.

Key	Values
mode	"clock", "stopwatch", "timer", "market"
size	"small", "medium", "large"
font	"sans", "digital" (seven-segment), "matrix"
palette	"default", "warm", "cool", "amber", "green", "red", "yellow", "studio"
clock_format	"24h", "12h"
show_seconds, show_date, seconds_ring	true / false
second_zone	None, or Some("tokyo") with one of "utc", "los-angeles", "chicago", "new-york", "sao-paulo", "london", "paris", "oslo", "dubai", "mumbai", "singapore", "hong-kong", "tokyo", "sydney"
backdrop, chroma, text_outline, always_on_top	true / false
hotkeys	true / false: the Ctrl+Alt+Shift hotkeys
timer_minutes	1 to 1440
timer_sound	true / false
pomodoro	true / false: run the timer as a Pomodoro cycle
alarm_at	"HH:MM", the alarm's time (default 07:00)
night	"off", "on", "auto"
night_from, night_to	"HH:MM", used by "auto" (default 22:00 to 07:00)
night_dim	0.6 to 1.0
check_updates	true / false: the daily check for a new release
markets	exchange ids in display order: "new-york", "london", "oslo", "frankfurt", "mumbai", "shanghai", "hong-kong", "tokyo", "sydney"
board_layout	"vertical", "horizontal"
board_labels	"city", "code"

The file also holds the window position, the state of a running stopwatch or timer, whether the alarm is set (alarm_due) and the last update check, which the app manages itself.

Building

Requires Rust 1.95 or newer.

cargo run --release   # build and run the overlay
cargo test            # unit tests

Packaging, the end-to-end test scripts, releasing and regenerating the screenshots and the website are in docs/development.md.

How it works

docs/architecture.md explains how the app is built and why: how settings are stored, when it redraws, how the market hours are computed without a time zone database, how installing and single-instance handling work, and how updates are signed and checked.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.