Polynya is a launcher that lives in the free space of the Windows 11 taskbar and turns it into a living info panel.
Launchers like Raycast or PowerToys Run work on demand only: press the hotkey, do the thing, close it, and the rest of the time they are not on screen. Polynya has Alt+Space for launching programs, searching files, calculations and utilities, but it also has a permanent place on screen. So its output works by itself, with no extra keystrokes: time and weather, a player with a live equalizer and notifications from background commands and modules are always in sight, while the icons and the tray around them stay clickable as usual.
What's inside
- Search launcher. Fuzzy search over classic and Store apps, instant file search via Everything, a calculator with string operations and tolerant comparisons (
0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3), a currency converter (100 usd to eur). - Player and visualizer. Works with any Windows media session. The five-band spectrum is built from the audio of the player process alone, via WASAPI process loopback.
- Time and weather. A clock with rolling digits, an hourly and three-day forecast from Open-Meteo, no API keys.
- Notification stack. Shows long terminal commands finishing (
cargo build · 48 s), AI agent statuses (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) and messages from your own scripts and modules in the taskbar.
Look and behavior
Polynya takes the taskbar's color, edge, outline and grain, follows the theme, accent and wallpaper; its dropdowns use the system Mica material. Every control is readable by screen readers (Narrator, NVDA, JAWS) through UI Automation. In fullscreen games, videos and presentations it hides and draws no frames.
Modules
A module is a separate process that hands the island data as JSON (over a named pipe or stdin/stdout), and the island draws buttons, lists and input fields from it. Modules can be written in Rust, Python, Go, C#, JS and other languages; the protocol specification and the proto crate are MIT-licensed.
Technical details
Written in Rust with its own renderer (Direct2D / DirectComposition). At rest it uses 0% CPU and about 30 MB of memory. License: GPLv3 with additional terms under section 7. (license text)