Organize your desktop like magic!
A free, open-source Stardock Fences alternative for Windows 10/11 — group desktop icons into frames, mirror folders, and tidy your desktop.
A Data frame on the desktop — title bar with the ♥ menu, position lock, move handle and keep-on-top pin. Full-desktop view.
DesktopPossible is a hard fork of Desktop Frames + (MIT) by limbo666 / Nikos Georgousis, which is itself a continuation of the original BirdyFences by HakanKokcu. All upstream work belongs to those authors — see Credits.
As a hard fork, this project does not track or merge upstream commits — it evolves independently from the point of the fork. If you want the original prebuilt tool, use the upstream releases.
A note on AI assistance: in the interest of transparency, the fork-specific enhancements in this repository were built with substantial help from Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant) — used for writing, refactoring, and debugging the added code. The upstream projects are the work of their original human authors.
DesktopPossible creates virtual frames on your desktop, letting you group and organize icons cleanly.
Everything below was added in this fork and is not in Desktop Frames +.
- Text frames (BGInfo-style): live text painted straight onto the wallpaper from a template of tokens —
{ComputerName},{UserName},{OS},{CPU},{CPUUsage},{RAMUsed},{RAMUsage},{IP},{ExternalIP},{Disks},{Uptime},{Date:fmt},{Time:fmt},{Profile}and more — with font, colour, alignment, draw mode (Normal / Shadow / Glow / Outline / Emboss / Engrave), opacity and a per-frame refresh interval. Chrome-less and click-through, always beneath the other frames. Managed from Options → Text Frames; the Default profile seeds a System Info frame in the top-right corner. - Profiles follow your virtual desktops: turn on Automatically Switch Profiles with Virtual Desktop and the profile whose name matches the Windows virtual desktop (e.g. "Work", or "Desktop 2" for unnamed ones) activates as you switch with
Win + Ctrl + ←/→; desktops with no matching profile fall back to Default. No rules to configure. - One-click desktop categorization: tray → Sort Desktop into Categories classifies every loose desktop icon (a 256-app known list, product-name rules, game-store / VR / protocol heuristics, then winget and Chocolatey tag lookups) and files it into Productivity, Utilities, Games, VR, Developer Tools, Security, Media, Documents, Images or Other frames — created only when needed and auto-placed in free screen space. Enable Auto-Organize keeps doing it for new arrivals. Unclassified items are never moved.
- Frames own real files: drop a document or picture into a frame and the file moves into the frame's own folder (hold
Ctrlto copy) and opens through the shell directly — no shortcut wrapping. Deleting a frame that holds files asks whether to move them back to the desktop or delete them (typed confirmation), and Empty Frames to Desktop puts everything back across all profiles in one go. - Edit Frames Mode: frames are locked in place and size by default; one toggle (tray menu or any frame's right-click) makes them movable and resizable, with grid snapping while you drag.
- Free grid placement: Data frames are a grid — put each icon exactly where you want it, gaps included, with a live preview while dragging;
Ctrl-drag clones an icon. The classic auto-flow layout is one un-tick away (Free arrange). - Explorer-like drag-and-drop: dropping a shortcut moves it (
Ctrlcopies, with the standard + badge); dragging out hands the file to Explorer. - Native shell context menu on icons: right-click an icon and get the full Windows menu — Open with, Send to, shell extensions, Properties (
Shiftfor extended verbs) — with DesktopPossible's own actions appended. - Send to Profile, Arrange Frames (auto-size and tile every frame), Arrange Now, and a Transparent colour plus per-frame Title Bar Color.
- Options apply instantly — no Save/Cancel.
- MSI installer alongside the portable zip (Program Files + Start Menu, data in
%LocalAppData%, in-place upgrades), and a quiet update check against GitHub releases: a link in Options, a dot on the tray icon, the latest version on the About page — never a pop-up. - Chameleon mode that keeps up: frames re-tint when the wallpaper changes, including slideshows and Windows Spotlight.
- Tunable idle behaviour: wake-up hover delay before a faded frame reappears; click-to-raise keeps frames ordered among themselves.
- Frame types: Data frames (shortcuts and files), Portal frames (live mirror of a folder with navigation, filters and an Explorer-style Details view — sortable, groupable columns, zebra striping, native context menu) and Image frames (with content lock).
- Tabs inside Data frames; workspace profiles with hotkeys (direct 0–9, previous, next), import/export of
.framefiles, and daily backups. - Dynamic visibility: peek-behind, roll-up, auto-hide, idle fade-out, keep-on-top pinning, hide/show all (
Ctrl + Alt + Hor double-click the tray icon). - Broad launch support: files, folders, web links, Store apps, Steam games, Spotify URIs, run-as-admin / run-as-different-user; 15 launch animations.
- Theming: 13 colours, global and per-frame tint, per-frame border and title colours, Chameleon wallpaper-matching, and dark-mode menus that follow the OS.
- Optional Create New Frame entry in the desktop's right-click menu (draw a rectangle), double-click the empty desktop to toggle native icons, frame snapping, and spacers.
- Fast: cached shell icons, lazy menus, batched Portal updates, working-set trimming.
Every release ships two downloads:
Installer (recommended): run DesktopPossible-<version>-win-x64.msi. It installs to
C:\Program Files\DesktopPossible, adds a Start Menu shortcut, and upgrades an existing
install in place. Your configuration lives in %LocalAppData%\DesktopPossible\Data.
Uninstall from Settings > Apps like any other program (your data folder is left untouched), or run the MSI again for a Repair/Remove menu — removing that way also offers to delete your data (kept by default).
Portable: download DesktopPossible-<version>-win-x64.zip, unzip it anywhere you like
(for example C:\Tools\DesktopPossible) and run DesktopPossible.exe. All configuration is
stored beside the executable, so moving the folder moves your setup with it.
Either way, to launch at boot enable the start-with-Windows option inside the app — it registers (and cleans up) the autostart entry for you.
Requires Windows 10 or 11. The download is self-contained; no separate .NET installation is needed.
The project targets .NET 10 (net10.0-windows10.0.19041.0) and builds with the plain .NET SDK on any OS (COM interop is late-bound; EnableWindowsTargeting is preconfigured). The app itself — and its test suite — runs on Windows only.
- Install the .NET 10+ SDK.
- Clone the repository and run:
./build.ps1 # Builds the solution (dotnet SDK)
./test-smoke.ps1 # Runs the unit test suite (Windows)
./start-app.ps1 # Builds (if needed) and launches the app| Topic | Description |
|---|---|
| User Manual | Full feature walkthrough — frames, customization, settings |
| Tips & Tricks | Power-user features: portal filters, profiles |
| Advanced Tweaks | JSON-level configuration tweaks |
| Upstream Version History | Pre-fork release history from the upstream project |
Contributions are welcome. Pull requests should target the develop branch — main is release-only and is updated by the release process.
We use Conventional Commits; commit messages drive automated versioning:
feat: add new frame grouping option # Minor version bump
fix: correct portal refresh on rename # Patch version bump
feat!: redesign profile storage # Major version bump (breaking)
docs: update manual screenshots # No release
Releases are maintainer-triggered; merged work ships when the maintainer cuts the next release.
Versions follow Semantic Versioning and are calculated automatically from conventional commit messages. Release tags (vX.Y.Z) are created by CI — never by hand.
MIT — see LICENSE, which retains the full copyright chain: DevPossible (this fork), limbo666 (Desktop Frames +), and HakanKokcu (BirdyFences). Third-party library and asset attributions are in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.
- Original BirdyFences by HakanKokcu.
- Desktop Frames + by limbo666 / Nikos Georgousis — please star and support the upstream project.
- DesktopPossible is maintained by DevPossible (GitHub), building on the above under the MIT License, with development assistance from Claude (see the AI note above).