A clock for your Windows desktop - sixteen faces and no clutter. Analog, digital, word clock, terminal, banner. Frameless and transparent, it sits on your wallpaper, stays put through Show Desktop, and remembers its place. Around 1 MB, under 10 MB of RAM, twenty languages, no telemetry.
- Sixteen Clock Faces - Analog, digital, word clock, terminal, banner and more; pick one from the right-click menu or double-click the clock to cycle
- Per-Face Customization - Colours, numerals, ticks, the date line, 12- or 24-hour time. Each face offers only the options it actually has
- Frameless & Transparent - No window, no background. It sits directly on your wallpaper
- Drag Anywhere - Grab it and move it; position and size are remembered
- Scale From Widget to Wall - Resize from the right-click menu puts a grip in the corner; drag it to any size
- Show Seconds - Second hand on or off, your choice
- Light & Dark - The Customize and About dialogs follow your Windows theme
- Survives Win+D - Stays where you put it, even after Show Desktop
- Always on Top (optional) - Or let it live quietly behind your windows
- Start with Windows (optional)
- System Tray Icon (optional) - Same menu, from the notification area
- High-DPI Sharp - Rescales cleanly across monitors and DPI boundaries
- 20 Languages - Matched automatically to your Windows display language
- Native & Tiny - Software Direct2D. No frameworks, no background services, no runtime to install
- No Telemetry - Nothing collected, nothing sent, no account, no internet needed
- Purchasing from the Microsoft Store helps support ongoing development ❤️
- You can also support via GitHub Sponsors:
| Microsoft Store | GitHub Release | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | 🪙 Paid | 🆓 Free |
| Updates | ✅ Automatic | ❌ Manual |
| Security | ✅ Signed & verified | ❌ Not signed |
- Option 1 : Install from Microsoft Store
- Option 2 : Download the portable exe from the Github Releases Page
- Option 3 : Build it yourself (see below)
| Simple | Clean analog dial, the default |
| Classic dark / Classic light | Traditional dial with numerals, two themes |
| Minimal | Ticks only, no numerals |
| Icon | The app's own mark as a dial |
| Bold | Heavy markers, high contrast |
| Flat | Solid disc, flat colour |
| Glass | Frosted-glass dial |
| Dots | Dot markers instead of ticks |
| Digital / Digital bold | Panel readout with optional date and AM/PM |
| Word clock | Spells the time out in English on a letter grid |
| Stack | Hour over minute |
| Terminal | Monospaced console readout with a blinking cursor |
| Banner | Wide condensed type |
| Split | Hour and minute split apart |
Pick one from the right-click menu, or double-click the clock to cycle through them.
The right-click menu is the whole interface:
- Face - The sixteen faces, in a submenu
- Customize... - The options the current face actually has: colours, numerals, tick marks, the date line, 12- or 24-hour time, drop shadows, frosted glass. Changes apply instantly, and one button resets a face to its original look
- Show seconds - Second hand on or off
- Resize - Turns on the grip at the bottom-right corner; drag it to scale
- Always on top
- Start with Windows
- Show in system tray
- About DeskTick...
- Exit
Everything is saved to %LOCALAPPDATA%\DeskTick.ini.
- Windows 10 or Windows 11 - x64, ARM64 or x86
- No .NET, no Visual C++ redistributable, no runtime of any kind
MSBuild only - no package manager, no test suite.
$mb = "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\18\Community\MSBuild\Current\Bin\MSBuild.exe"
& $mb src\DeskTick\DeskTick.vcxproj -p:Configuration=Release -p:Platform=x64Output lands in src\DeskTick\x64\Release\DeskTick.exe. Every translation is compiled in, so the exe is the whole app.
Twenty languages: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malayalam, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil & Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.
All of them live in one spreadsheet, src\DeskTick\Localization\translations.csv: a row per string, a column per language, and a context column saying where each string appears. Adding a language is a new column and a translation pass; then run Localization\build.ps1 and rebuild. Pull requests welcome.
Nothing is collected, nothing is sent. There is no account, no telemetry, and no internet connection required.
- Image faces - drop a PNG in
assets\and it becomes a dial - More faces and more languages
- A localizable word clock
Contributions are welcome! Feel free to fork and submit pull requests.
Park it in a corner with Always on top off - it stays visible on the desktop, out of the way of your windows, and Win+D never loses it.
(c) 2026 RYF Tools. All rights reserved.