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Curious Coder

Rainmeter for Desktop Customization

Rainmeter ‘skins’ let you customize your Windows desktop to look really cool and/or get some useful information quickly. Modern computers won’t take a noticeable hit in performance unless Rainmeter is used to do a ton of things. I wrote my own lightweight skins to help me view information I frequently need by just going to the Desktop.

How to Setup

  1. Download Rainmeter and install it.
  2. Search for ‘skins’ on Deviantart using keywords like system/calendar/notes.
  3. Download the ‘.rmskin’ file.
  4. Just double click it and it should install and open up using Rainmeter.
  5. Optionally download rmskin files and repeat.
  6. It is easy to unload a skin just by right click -> Unload skin

Rainmeter wide settings for each skin such as position on screen, enabled/disabled, transparency etc are stored here ‘C:\Users<Username>\AppData\Roaming\Rainmeter\Rainmeter.ini’

This file also contains a setting called SkinPath and this is usually ‘C:\Users<Username>\Documents\Rainmeter\Skins’. This is where each skin can be edited.

My setup

Here’s how my current setup looks like. My Rainmeter Setup

I have quick access to:

  1. my todo.txt so I never lose track of the things I need to finish for the day. Double clicking opens up todotxt.net and clicking it once cycles through my personal/work todo items. It is the same todo.txt file but I have a lua script that filters using +Work or +Admin.
  2. A quick Pomodoro timer.
  3. the WiFi network I am connected to- this is useful for me in a corporate environment where different networks affect my laptop behavior differently. Clicking CPU opens up task-manager.
  4. Weather and time at two places.

It is easy enough to add other things like top processes, disk space etc but I don’t need them as often.