PowerProut is a modern, lightweight, and highly customizable productivity toolbar for Windows.
PowerProut is heavily inspired by the legendary PowerPro software created by Bruce Switzer. While PowerPro was a Swiss Army knife for Windows automation for decades, PowerProut aims to bring some of its most essential and beloved features to the modern era, leveraging contemporary frameworks and a sleek user interface.
A floating (or snapped) toolbar that stays out of your way until you need it.
- Customizable Blocks: Create as many blocks as you want.
- Triple-Action Buttons: Every block supports up to three different actions mapped to Left, Middle, and Right mouse clicks.
- Visual Flexibility: Blocks can display icons (Fluent Icons or custom PNGs), dynamic text, or a mix of both.
Never lose a copied text again.
- Recent History: Automatically captures your clipboard history.
- Pinning: Keep your most frequently used snippets just one click away.
- Quick Paste: Click any snippet to immediately copy it back to your clipboard.
A robust alarm system integrated directly into your workflow.
- Recurring Schedules: Daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly recurrences.
- Smart Notifications: Native Windows notifications for triggered alarms.
- Snooze Support: Postpone alarms directly from the popup.
The entire application interface is fully localized.
- Languages: Supports English and French.
- Smart Detection: Automatically detects your system language, with manual override available in the General Settings.
- System Controls: Quick access to Sleep, Shutdown, Restart, or Show Desktop.
- App Launcher: One-click access to your favorite applications with optional arguments.
- Web Links: Open specific URLs in your default browser.
- Internal Actions: Toggle dock features like Auto-Hide directly from a block.
- Time & Date: Highly customizable clock with timezone support.
- Native AOT: Compiled ahead-of-time for near-instant startup and minimal memory footprint.
- WinUI 3: Built with the latest Windows UI Library for a native, premium look and feel.
- Self-Contained .NET: The .NET runtime is bundled with the executable for maximum stability.
PowerProut is designed to be portable and efficient. Simply run the executable, and right-click the tray icon (or the dock itself) to access the settings and start building your perfect productivity bar.
PowerProut is built to be a high-performance, system-level utility. Its design focuses on speed, reliability, and low resource overhead.
- Framework: Developed in C# 13 on .NET 10.
- User Interface: Powered by WinUI 3 (Windows App SDK 1.8+), providing a rich, fluent, and responsive UI experience that feels consistent with modern Windows 11.
- Native AOT Compilation: Unlike standard .NET applications, PowerProut is compiled using Native Ahead-of-Time. This results in:
- Zero JIT (Just-In-Time) latency: The code is ready to run immediately.
- Low Memory Footprint: No need for the full .NET runtime in memory; specialized "trimming" removes all unused code.
- Optimized Distribution: The .NET runtime is bundled directly into the executable. Note that the Windows App SDK Runtime (External) remains a system-level dependency.
- Native Interoperability: Deep integration with the Windows OS through high-performance P/Invoke (Win32 API) calls to
user32.dll,shell32.dll, andshlwapi.dllfor advanced window manipulation, tray icon management, and system-level actions. - Data Persistence: Settings, alarms, and snippets are persisted as optimized JSON files using System.Text.Json Source Generators, ensuring full compatibility with Native AOT without using slow reflection.
- Modular Design: A separation of concerns between background managers (Dock, Alarms, Snippets) and the UI frontend, ensuring stable background performance even while the settings windows are closed.