Glassbar

A GPU-rendered Windows 11 taskbar replacement built with Tauri 2, React, and Rust. Explorer remains active; Glassbar owns only the visible taskbar surface and the shell interaction layer.

Features

• Taskbar pill — a compact, centered, transparent AppBar with live Windows Graphics Capture underneath a liquid-glass shader: refraction, dual-Kawase blur, chromatic dispersion, tint and reveal animations.
• App buttons and menus — live window enumeration with extracted executable icons, per-app menus, hover previews, pinned apps with launch, focus, minimize and restore.
• Auto-hide and reveal — the pill slides away (eased off-screen) when a maximized or fullscreen app covers it, and returns when the cursor enters a bottom reveal strip; the reveal band's height and hysteresis are user-configurable, and it also honors a z-order "desktop band" so a parked pill is treated like part of the desktop rather than always-on-top.
• Full-platform click-through — the overlay is hit-tested every 8 ms: only the pill's buttons and open menus capture the mouse; every other pixel passes clicks to the windows behind.
• Control center — quick settings cards: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, battery, sound (including per-app mixer), Do Not Disturb, night light, airplane mode.
• System tray — enumerates Explorer's tray service, forwards clicks and context menus to system tray icons, and offers a hidden-window reveal.
• Media — transport controls, timeline and hover cards for the current media session, plus a scroll-wheel volume feature.
• Gadgets — clock/calendar, weather, keyboard layout, media and other live DOM gadgets inside the pill.
• Glass settings — live, session-wide glass material tuning: the values are shared with every glass app on the system through the liquid-glass broker's material file.

Design

• UI (src/features): React taskbar controls, menus, settings, control center and gadgets. It only receives typed shell data and never implements desktop rendering.
• Shell (src-tauri/src/shell): Windows API integration through windows-rs — window enumeration, foreground activation, monitor queries, the AppBar registration boundary, tray, media, radios and the shell state modules.
• Renderer (src-tauri/src/renderer): the taskbar's glass state — the pill surface, hover previews, menu-glass delegation, resize springs, and the overlay supervision plumbing (slide, z-order, click-through rules).
• Supervision loop (src-tauri/src/hit_test_loop): the 8 ms overlay loop that wires click-through hit-testing, the auto-hide slide, the reveal strip and the z-order band together.
• Commands (src-tauri/src/commands): the Tauri command surface, one module per feature area.

Glass dependencies

Glassbar is a consumer of two reusable library repos:

• liquid-glass — the engine: D3D11 surfaces, Windows Graphics Capture, the shader, and the session broker (glass-broker.exe, compiled from this repo's trampoline bin so the app and its broker always share the same protocol build).
• glass-ui — the reusable glass UI kit: the React components and styles behind the pill, plus the native MenuGlassManager for menus and previews.

The Rust deps track those repos' main branches; the committed [patch] sections in src-tauri/Cargo.toml redirect them to sibling checkouts (../liquid-glass, ../glass-ui/native) so local edits apply instantly — clone all three repos side by side to contribute to everything at once.

Development

npm install
npm run tauri dev

For a frontend-only visual preview (no native glass or shell):

npm run dev

Note for Rust work: cargo fetches git dependencies itself and cannot use your Git credential helper by default; enable the CLI fallback once per machine if the two library repos are private:

# ~/.cargo/config.toml
[net]
git-fetch-with-cli = true

Packaging

npm run tauri build

Tauri bundles the app and automatically ships every [[bin]] target — including the glass-broker trampoline — beside the executable, which is where the liquid-glass library's clients spawn the broker.