Rug for Windows lays a heavy wool rug over your desktop icons. The icons show up as bumps under the cloth, and you can lift an edge to peek at what's underneath. Literally sweep your desktop mess under the rug.
It is a Windows port of Rug, the open-source macOS app by Artem.
What you can do
- Move: Drag the rug by any edge. Hold Alt to lift it into the air, then let go to drop it.
- Rotate and resize: Scroll over the rug to turn it, or hold Alt and scroll to resize it.
- Sweep icons under the rug: Piles all your icons under the rug. Put icons back restores the layout, even after a restart.
- Make your own rug: Turn any top-down picture into a rug.
- Floors: Swap your wallpaper for a desktop floor, and restore the previous wallpaper whenever you like.
- 5 rugs: Persian, Neural (circuit-board ornaments), Soviet, Pixel and Turkish.
How it works
The rug is drawn in a transparent window that sits above your desktop icons and below other windows. Desktop rug app for Windows It only reacts to the mouse over the rug, so clicks outside it pass through to the desktop. The cloth is driven by a physics simulation with friction and self-collision, so it folds like a real rug instead of stretching. Rendering uses Direct3D 11, with soft shadows and wool relief.
Requirements
- Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit)
- A graphics card with Direct3D 11 support
- .NET 8 Desktop Runtime (x64)
Installation
- Download
release-windows.zipfrom the latest release. - Unzip it anywhere.
- Run
Rug.exe(keeprug_native.dllin the same folder).
Right-click the tray icon for a quick menu, or double-click it to open settings. Sweeping icons requires Explorer's Auto arrange icons option to be turned off.
Known limitations
- Only the main monitor is covered for now.
- If Explorer restarts, Rug needs to be restarted too.
Rug for Windows is open source and released under the MIT license. Check out the GitHub repository for the source code, build instructions and issue reports.