Chargle 1.0

Chargle plays a sound when your laptop starts charging, and another when it stops. Windows still does not do this on its own.

This is the first release.

Getting it

Download the zip for your machine, extract it anywhere, and run Chargle.exe. There is nothing to install first.

• Chargle-1.0.0-win-x64.zip for most PCs
• Chargle-1.0.0-win-arm64.zip for Snapdragon and other ARM machines

If you are not sure, check Settings > System > About > System type.

Chargle lives in the tray. Click the icon to open it, right click for a short menu.

What is in it

Eight sound packs, none of them recordings. They are generated by code in the repository, so you can change a number and hear the difference. Each pack is a pair that moves in opposite directions: plugging in rises, unplugging falls, so you can tell which happened from across the room.

An on-screen panel, if you would rather see it than hear it. Three densities, eight colours including your Windows accent, four positions, and an adjustable dwell time. It is click-through and never steals focus.

Battery chimes for full and low, off by default.

Your own sounds, if none of the packs suit. Any wav, mp3, m4a, flac, ogg, wma or aiff. The file is copied into your sounds folder and becomes a pack of its own, so it keeps working if you later move or delete the original.

Light, dark, or follow Windows.

It keeps quiet during Do Not Disturb, focus sessions, screen sharing and full-screen apps.

Chargle starts with Windows by default and starts hidden, so you get the tray icon and nothing else. Both are switches in Rules.

Speed

The first sound after a quiet stretch arrives in about 86 ms instead of about 590 ms, because Chargle can hold the audio device open rather than waking it on demand. That is Instant mode, and it is on by default. It costs a little battery, so there is a switch. The measurements and the method are in the readme.

Privacy

No account, no telemetry, and no network requests at all. Settings live in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Chargle.

Known limits

There is no Microsoft Store build yet.

The download is not code signed, so Windows will show a SmartScreen warning the first time you run it. Click More info, then Run anyway.

The zips are large because they are self-contained and carry the .NET runtime, so nothing else has to be installed.