Plots — desktop groups for Windows

A lightweight Stardock Fences–style organizer. Single Plots.exe, no installer, no runtime.

A plot on the desktop: icons snap into a translucent panel that blends with your wallpaper.

Settings

Each plot: look, tabs, live folder and icon size	Appearance for every plot
General: new items, snapping, Peek shortcut	Export, import and scheduled backups

Features

• Plots: translucent panels on the desktop that hold your icons. Set the title, colour, opacity and rounded corners for each one.
• Drag and drop: drop an icon into a plot and it snaps into the grid and stays there. Icons auto-align with adjustable padding.
• Real desktop icons: icons stay normal Explorer icons. New, renamed and deleted files show up straight away, and Plots recovers after Explorer restarts.
• Inbox plot: pick one plot and every new item saved to the desktop lands in it automatically. Plots can also move finished downloads to the desktop.
• Sorting rules: send files to a plot by type (images, documents, installers, archives and more).
• Tabs: split one plot into two or more tabs of equal width. Drag a plot onto another's title bar to merge them into tabs, drag a tab to reorder it, or drag it out onto the desktop to make it a plot of its own.
• Roll up: collapse a plot to its title bar with the chevron, or by double-clicking the title. Hovering a rolled-up plot shows its contents.
• Scrolling: plots with more icons than fit scroll with the mouse wheel, or can grow to fit instead.
• Live folders: a plot can show the contents of any folder, with thumbnails, sorting, its own icon size, optional icon tinting and the normal Explorer right-click menu.
• Fade until hover: plots, and optionally the desktop icons, rest faded into the wallpaper and come into focus when the mouse is over them.
• Peek: a shortcut you choose (Ctrl+Alt+P by default) shows every plot above your windows over a dimmed screen. Double-click an icon to open it. Press the shortcut again, or Esc, to hide them.
• Backup and restore: export your whole layout to a .plots file, import it on another PC, and keep daily, weekly or monthly backups in a folder you pick.
• Move and resize anytime: drag a plot by its title bar or edges, with snap to grid and fine control near screen edges. There's also a full edit mode.
• Multi-monitor: every plot remembers its monitor and follows each monitor's DPI scale.
• Global look: one header style, font, font size and colour for every plot, or set each plot on its own. Desktop icon size can be changed from Settings too.
• Double-click to hide (optional): hide or show all icons and plots by double-clicking empty desktop.
• Right-click menus on plot title bars, and a tray icon for quick access.
• Starts fast with Windows, and the desktop check interval is adjustable from 0.1 to 0.5 s.
• Updates itself: checks GitHub Releases from the About page or automatically, then updates in place. Every update is signed, and Plots refuses one that isn't.
• 8 languages: English, Français, Español, Português (Brasil), Deutsch, 中文（简体）, 日本語 and Русский. Plots follows your Windows language, or pick one under General › Language.
• Seasonal themes: Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Easter, Lunar New Year, Canada Day, the 4th of July, both Thanksgivings, New Year and the four seasons. Each recolours the plots and adds small drawn decorations. Pick which holidays show automatically, always use one, or keep your colours and add only the decorations.
• Background images: give any plot a picture behind its icons, filled, fitted, stretched or tiled, with its own opacity.
• Lock a plot so it can't be moved, resized, merged or split by accident (right-click its title bar, or in Settings).
• Small and portable: one Plots.exe, no installer, no runtime. Every release is security-scanned before it's published.

Seasonal themes

Turn them on under Settings › Seasonal themes. Automatic shows each holiday for a week or two before the day.

Languages

Plots in French. It follows your Windows display language automatically.

Plots is translated into French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Russian. The translations are machine-assisted, so corrections from native speakers are very welcome: each language is one file in lang/, and lang/README.md explains how to fix a string or add a language.

Run it

Download Plots.exe from the latest release. There's nothing to install.

First run: Plots isn't code-signed, so Windows may show "Windows protected your PC". Click More info, then Run anyway. Windows only asks once per download. Every release is built from this repository by GitHub Actions and security-scanned before it's published (how).

1. Quit Fences first. Both apps move the same desktop icons and will fight each other.
2. Double-click Plots.exe. The Plots icon appears in the tray.
3. First run opens edit mode with one plot.

Edit mode

Open it from the tray menu (Edit plots), from a plot's right-click menu, or with Edit layout in Settings.

• Drag a plot to move it. Drag its edges to resize it.
• Double-click a plot to rename it. Right-click it for colour, opacity, the inbox setting and delete.
• + New plot adds as many plots as you want, on any monitor.
• Click Done to save. Icons already sitting under a plot join it.

Everyday use

• Drag any desktop icon into a plot and it snaps into the plot's grid. Drag it out and it stays where you drop it.
• Drag an icon onto another spot in the same plot to reorder.
• Right-click a plot's title bar to open the Plots menu. Right-clicking anywhere else still gives the normal Explorer menu.
• A plot grows taller if it holds more icons than fit.
• Inbox plot: pick one plot under New items & downloads go to this plot. Any new item that Windows places on the desktop goes there: downloads, saved files, and anything created while Plots was closed. It's marked with a ⤓ arrow. Files you drag onto a specific plot from Explorer, or create there with right-click › New, stay where you dropped them.
• Move new files from Downloads to the desktop (optional): when your browser finishes a download, Plots moves it to the desktop so it lands in the inbox. Partial downloads (.crdownload, .part, …) are ignored.
• Double-click to hide (optional, off by default): double-click empty desktop to hide or show all icons and plots. You can also use the tray menu.

Why it keeps up when Fences doesn't

Plots doesn't keep its own copy of your icons. They stay as real Explorer desktop icons. Plots checks them about twice a second through the documented shell interfaces (IFolderView) and fixes any icon that is out of place. That covers new files, renamed files, deletions, Explorer restarts, monitor changes and DPI changes. A file that briefly disappears keeps its plot. A file is only removed from its plot after it's really gone from disk.

Multi-monitor

Each plot remembers the monitor it's on, by device name, and its position on that monitor. If you unplug that monitor, the plot moves onto the primary monitor until you plug it back in. Sizes follow each monitor's DPI scale.

Settings and files

• Settings window: open it from the tray icon (single click), or with Settings… in any menu.
• Config: %APPDATA%\Plots\config.json. Log: %APPDATA%\Plots\plots.log.
• Plots turns off Explorer's Auto arrange icons and Align icons to grid. You can turn this off in Settings, but plots may then look misaligned.

Uninstalling

Turn off Start with Windows in Settings › General, choose Exit Plots from the tray icon, then delete Plots.exe and %APPDATA%\Plots. Your icons stay on the desktop.

Building

Version: the VERSION file holds the version (e.g. 0.2.2). Bump it when you want a new number. If you push without bumping, CI uses the next free patch number (0.2.3, …), so builds never collide.

GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/build.yml) builds Plots on every push to main and, once the security scans pass, publishes a GitHub Release v<VERSION>, marked Latest, with Plots.exe, Plots-update.exe and its signature Plots-update.exe.sig attached. Drop both update files next to a running Plots and it updates itself; Plots also checks Releases on its own. Updates must be signed with the release key or Plots won't install them (how). Pull requests only build and test.

Local build (build.bat does this on Windows): it stamps <VERSION>-dev, so a later GitHub release of the same number counts as newer:

go build -trimpath -ldflags "-s -w -H windowsgui -X main.version=0.2.2-dev" -o Plots.exe .

.exe files are git-ignored. On Linux or macOS, add GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64. Requires Go 1.26+.

The icon, manifest and version info live in rsrc_windows_*.syso; keep those committed. To regenerate them after changing winres/, run go run github.com/tc-hib/go-winres@latest make --in winres/winres.json.

Platform-independent logic (engine.go, render.go, config.go, wallpaper.go) has unit tests: go test ./....

Security

Every push to main is scanned with govulncheck and CodeQL before it's released. A finding holds the release back and opens a security issue, which closes itself once a scan is clean. The scans also run daily and on pull requests. Details: docs/SECURITY-FLOW.md. To report a vulnerability, see SECURITY.md.

• Dependabot (.github/dependabot.yml) opens grouped pull requests every Monday for Go modules and GitHub Actions.
• Signed updates: each release's update is signed with an Ed25519 key held only as a GitHub secret. Plots checks the signature, the file's SHA-256 and that the version is newer before installing, so a tampered download, a file dropped next to Plots.exe or an old release can't be installed. Release notes list the SHA-256 of Plots.exe. Details: docs/UPDATE-SIGNING.md.
• Imported layouts can't point the downloads mover at another folder or open network folders; Plots lists a file's live folders before you import it.
• Builds always use the newest Go 1.26 patch release, so standard-library security fixes are picked up automatically.

Privacy

Plots sends nothing about you or your PC anywhere. Its only network use is checking GitHub for new versions of Plots, which you can turn off under Settings › About. Details: docs/PRIVACY.md.

License

MIT © Andrew Lyle

Layout of the code

File	What it does
engine.go	Assignment, drag detection, ordering, inbox, rename tracking, grid layout (pure Go, tested)
render.go	Draws plot panels: rounded translucent body, title band, title text
config.go	Config model, load/save
shellview_windows.go	COM: desktop IFolderView (read and move icons, turn off auto-arrange)
desktop_windows.go	Finds the layer behind the icons (WorkerW / Progman, including the 24H2 layout), monitors
app_windows.go	Main loop, tick, panels on the desktop layer, hide/show
edit_windows.go	Edit-mode overlays (move/resize), toolbar, new/delete plot
settings_windows.go	Settings window
tray_windows.go	Tray icon, tray menu, plot right-click menu, colour picker
hook_windows.go	Low-level mouse hook on its own thread (title right-click, double-click hide, drop hints)
downloads_windows.go	Downloads → desktop mover, start with Windows
panels_windows.go	Draws plot panels on the desktop layer, behind the icons
wallpaper.go, wallpaper_windows.go	Blends each panel with the wallpaper underneath it so it looks see-through
watcher_windows.go	Watches the desktop folders and refreshes Explorer when it misses a change
fonts_windows.go	Lists installed fonts for the Appearance page
.github/workflows/build.yml	CI: test, vet, build Plots.exe, run the scans, publish a release on every clean push to main
.github/workflows/security.yml, .github/scripts/security-report.sh	govulncheck and CodeQL; opens and closes security issues
.github/dependabot.yml	Dependabot update PRs
about_windows.go, update.go	About page, GitHub links, update check / download from GitHub Releases
plotmodel.go	Tabs, sorting rules and their presets, merging plots and splitting tabs
backup.go, backup_windows.go	Export / import of .plots layouts, scheduled backups
peek_windows.go, peekview_windows.go	The Peek shortcut and the plots it shows above your windows
seasons.go, seasons_windows.go, ornaments.go	Seasonal themes: dates, colours and the drawn decorations
bgimage.go	Plot background images: loading, caching and layout
iconfade_windows.go	Fades the desktop icons with the plots
i18n.go, i18n_windows.go, lang/*.json	Translations: T("English text") looks the text up in the current language
update.go, updatekey.go, internal/updatesig/, tools/sign/	Signed updates: checking them in Plots, and making the key and signatures
snapshot_windows.go	Saves PNGs of the settings pages (create snap.request next to config.json; add lang=fr for another language) for docs