eye breaks for windows that stay out of your way
rest lives in your tray and reminds you to look away from the screen every twenty minutes, which is the 20-20-20 rule. hours of staring at a monitor dries your eyes and tires the muscles that hold focus, and the cure is boring: look at something far away for twenty seconds. the hard part is remembering.
most reminder apps solve the remembering by interrupting you at the worst possible moment. rest tries not to. it notices when you are on a call, playing something fullscreen, or presenting, and holds the break until you are free again. if you walk away from the keyboard it counts that as a real break and quietly resets. a stuck app can never cancel your breaks forever, there is a ceiling on how long a break can be held.
grab rest.exe from the releases page, put it wherever you keep small tools, and run
it. nothing is written outside your user profile. the sloth appears in your tray and
that is the whole interface.
turn on launch at login from settings if you want it back after a reboot. your
settings live in %appdata%\rest\settings.json and you can edit that file by hand if
you prefer.
you need the visual studio build tools with the windows sdk, and cmake 3.20 or newer. there is nothing to fetch, no package manager, no vcpkg.
cmake -B build
cmake --build build --config Release
the binary lands at build\src\Release\rest.exe.
the backdrop in the screenshots is by juan pablo serrano arenas on pexels. the sloth is the app icon and it sleeps a lot, which is the point.