WinCraft

A small, modular tray utility for Windows 11, in the style of Microsoft PowerToys. One program owns the tray icon, the autostart entry, the global hotkeys, a command palette and a settings window. Features are written as plugins that plug into one Rust trait, so adding a feature never means touching the Win32 plumbing or writing any UI code.

Version 0.3 ships two plugins: ScreenDimmer and ShortcutDetector.

What you get

• Command palette — Win+Alt+P opens a search box on the monitor your pointer is on. Type a few letters, press Enter. Every plugin action, every plugin on/off switch and the host's own items are in it.
• Settings window — General, Plugins, Plugin Store and About, with a page per plugin: its options, its hotkeys, its config file and its README.
• Plugin store — what exists, what this copy has, and what needs a newer WinCraft.
• Tray icon — palette, settings, per-plugin toggles, log, config, exit.

Install

Download wincraft.exe from the Releases page and run it. There is no installer and nothing to unpack — it is a single file that writes its settings to %LOCALAPPDATA%\WinCraft.

To build it yourself you need the Windows SDK (for rc.exe, which compiles the icon into the exe). The Rust version is pinned by rust-toolchain.toml, so rustup fetches the right compiler on its own:

cd "E:\codespace\_claude_code\_rde\wincraft_windows_utilities_rust"; cargo build --release

Plugins

ScreenDimmer

Blacks out a monitor with an overlay you can click straight through. Moving your pointer onto a blacked-out monitor makes it partly see-through so you can still find things. Full README

Hotkey	What it does
Win+Alt+F1	Black out / restore monitor 1
Win+Alt+F2	Black out / restore monitor 2
Win+Alt+F3	Black out / restore monitor 3
Win+Alt+F12	Restore every monitor

ShortcutDetector

Shows which global key combinations are already taken on this PC, and tells you about any combination you press before you assign it. Full README

Hotkey	What it does
Win+Alt+Q	Open the shortcut detector

It cannot see programs that read keys through a keyboard hook, such as AutoHotkey scripts or PowerToys Keyboard Manager. Nothing can, short of injecting code into every running process, and the window says so.

Host hotkeys

Hotkey	What it does
Win+Alt+P	Open the command palette

Where your settings live

Everything is under %LOCALAPPDATA%\WinCraft, which is C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Local\WinCraft.

config.json            the host's own settings
plugins\
  screen_dimmer.json   one file per plugin
  shortcut_detector.json
cache\                 the last plugin index fetched from GitHub
wincraft.log           what the program did, emptied on every start

Splitting the files this way means resetting one plugin deletes one file, and a broken edit costs one plugin rather than your whole configuration. WinCraft 0.2 kept everything in config.json; the first 0.3 start moves it and says so in the log.

config.json

{
  "start_with_windows": false,
  "theme": "system",
  "palette_hotkey": "Win+Alt+P"
}

Key	Meaning
start_with_windows	Mirrors the tick box and the registry Run value.
theme	system, light or dark.
palette_hotkey	What opens the command palette.

plugins/<id>.json

{
  "enabled": true,
  "hotkeys": { "toggle_monitor_1": "Win+Alt+F1" },
  "settings": { "idle_opacity": 1.0, "hover_opacity": 0.7 }
}

WinCraft fills in every missing key on each start, so you never have to invent a name: start it once, then open the file and change the values. Anything you have already written is left alone.

Hotkey format

Modifiers joined to one key with +, in any case:

• Modifiers: Ctrl (or Control), Alt, Shift, Win
• Keys: A–Z, 0–9, F1–F24, Space, Esc, Tab, Enter, Backspace, Insert, Delete, Home, End, PageUp, PageDown, Left, Right, Up, Down, PrintScreen, Pause, ScrollLock, NumLock, Numpad0–Numpad9, NumpadPlus, NumpadMinus, NumpadMultiply, NumpadDivide, NumpadDecimal, and the punctuation keys ; = , - . / ` [ \ ] '

At least one modifier is needed — Windows will not hand a bare key to a background program. If another program already owns a combination, WinCraft keeps running, shows a tray notification and marks the hotkey as not registered on the plugin's page.

Command line

Option	What it does
--open-palette	Opens the command palette at startup.
--open-settings	Opens the settings window at startup.
--open-detector	Opens the ShortcutDetector window at startup.
--write-plugin-index	Regenerates plugins.json. For contributors.

Set WINCRAFT_DEBUG=1 for a more detailed log.

Writing a plugin

See CONTRIBUTING.md. A plugin is one folder, one trait implementation, a README, and one line in the plugin list. You describe your settings; WinCraft draws and saves them.

Licence

Not decided yet.