ii-windows 1.0.8 — Jazz-Handed Octopus

If 1.0.7 disappeared from your PC. On some Windows 11 machines, Microsoft Defender flagged the 1.0.7 qsw.exe as Trojan:Win32/Bearfoos.A!ml. That's a false positive from its machine-learning check on new, unsigned files, and it's being reported to Microsoft. Defender then removed the program along with its startup entry and Start menu shortcuts. This build was checked on Windows 11 with Defender on, running and updating, without a detection. To get ii back, download ii-windows-setup.exe below and choose Update (or open it from Settings → Apps → Installed apps → illogical-impulse → Modify). Your settings stay.

Spotlight. Its window now covers only the search box and results instead of the whole screen. With the full-screen window in front, some live wallpaper apps paused as if a fullscreen app were running.

If you're on 1.0.x, the update notification and the setup pick this up; your settings stay.

ii-windows 1.0.7 — Jazz-Handed Octopus

Fixes for #18 and a safer setup.

Wallpaper transitions (#18). Switching wallpapers no longer shows the old picture zoomed in, shifted or split for the first part of the animation. Two things caused it: ii took the "before" frame of the transition after it had already resized the picture for the new wallpaper, and the wallpaper ii hands to Windows made Windows play its own fade on the desktop, right over ii's. The transition now starts from the picture exactly as it was, and when ii draws the wallpaper itself Windows gets the new one quietly in the background. It showed most with pictures of different shapes, like a portrait one after a widescreen one.

Report a problem now puts the log of the ii that's running in the zip. Before, it could pick an empty log from a short helper process and leave the useful one as the "previous" log.

Setup

• Uninstalling keeps your settings, presets, notes, to-dos, AI chats and saved API keys, so a later install picks them up. To delete them too, turn on Also delete my settings and data; the button then says Uninstall and delete data.
• The setup only updates itself from its first page, before anything starts, and never when uninstalling. Before, it could replace itself in the middle of an install or an uninstall.
• On Windows 10 without winget, repairing or updating no longer installs winget (about 300 MB) unless you turn that option on.

If you're on 1.0.x, the update notification and the setup pick this up; your settings stay.

ii-windows 1.0.6 — Jazz-Handed Octopus

Report a problem. There's a new button at the bottom of About in Settings. It puts ii's latest logs, the setup log and some system info (Windows build, CPU, GPU, screens, how many fonts you have) into a zip on your Desktop, shows it in Explorer and opens a new issue here so you can attach it. Your user name is taken out of the paths, nothing gets uploaded by ii, and it's worth a look before you send it. The latest crash dump only goes in if you turn that on, since a dump can hold bits of what ii had in memory.

Smoother. Taking a region screenshot and copying something back from the clipboard history no longer hold up the shell while the picture is saved or decoded. Very long texts you copy (over 32k characters) are kept on disk instead of in memory, the online wallpaper catalogs are let go when you close that tab, and rendered LaTeX in the AI chat is cached up to a limit and reused after a restart.

Each release is now checked on a Windows 10 machine before it goes out: every panel opening, screenshots, idle CPU, the font and update problems from #16, and updating while ii runs.

If you're on 1.0.x, the update notification and the setup pick this up; your settings stay.

ii-windows 1.0.5 — Jazz-Handed Octopus

Another one for #16: updating from ii's update notification could fail with "...\ii-windows\fonts is in use", and you had to close ii yourself and run the setup again.

Programs ii started were getting a copy of ii's open files, the font files included. The setup ii opens for an update was one of them, so after closing ii it was still holding the fonts folder itself. Apps you launched from ii did the same. Now nothing ii starts takes its files along, and the setup also protects itself when an older ii opens it, so updating from the notification works even from the version you have now.

If you're on 1.0.x, the update notification and the setup pick this up; your settings stay.

ii-windows 1.0.4 — Jazz-Handed Octopus

A follow-up to #17.

With "Use same wallpaper for both" on (the default), Settings shows your wallpaper on the lock screen preview, but Windows' own lock screen (Win + L) kept its picture unless you picked a separate one. Now, when you change the wallpaper in ii, Windows' lock screen gets it too, as long as it's set to Picture in Windows Settings → Personalization → Lock screen. If you use Windows spotlight or a slideshow there, ii leaves it alone.

If you're on 1.0.x, the update notification and the setup pick this up; your settings stay.

ii-windows 1.0.3 — Jazz-Handed Octopus

A fix for #16.

On a PC with a lot of fonts installed, or with one of ii's fonts also installed in Windows, text and icons could suddenly turn into empty boxes (▯) or the wrong symbol, all over ii, and stay like that for a while even after reloading. Windows lets a program keep only 512 files open at a time by default, and the font engine keeps every font file it loads open, so once it went past that every new font failed to load. ii now raises that limit to the maximum when it starts.

If you're on 1.0.x, the update notification and the setup pick this up; your settings stay.

ii-windows 1.0.2 — Jazz-Handed Octopus

A quick one for #15.

If you opened ii's settings from the Start menu (the "illogical-impulse Settings" entry, which is also what comes up when you search for settings), you got a separate copy of the settings window. From there "Choose file" couldn't open the wallpaper picker, and Light/Dark switched Windows and ii's colors but that window didn't refresh, so it looked like nothing happened. The Start menu entry now opens the same settings window as the gear in the sidebar. If ii isn't running, it still opens on its own like before.

If you're on 1.0.0 or 1.0.1, the update notification and the setup pick this up; your settings stay.

ii-windows 1.0.1 — Jazz-Handed Octopus

A cleanup round on 1.0: a lighter shell sitting idle, and a few things that held on to memory for longer than they should.

Less memory. AI chat messages you delete, clear or replace with /load are actually freed now, after any reply, upload or approved command still writing to them is done. Before, every message stayed in memory until ii restarted, and the same goes for dismissed notifications. The left sidebar builds a tab when you first open it and lets a tab go two minutes after you leave it, keeping your draft, your translation and where you had scrolled. The overview is released two minutes after you close it, like the cheatsheet and the wallpaper selector already were. Online wallpaper thumbnails are decoded at the size they're shown, the blurred album cover behind the media tab is only loaded while the blur is on screen, a screenshot you cancel is dropped right away instead of 30 seconds later, and dock previews let go of the window capture once they fade out.

Less CPU. The desktop visualizer pauses while the desktop is covered, locked or in game mode, and loading spinners and the weather map marker stop when nobody can see them. A running stopwatch only ticks while something on screen shows it: once a second on the bar and the desktop, hundredths only on the sidebar tab that shows them.

Fixes

• With the widgets above the desktop icons (the default with the Windows wallpaper), the spinning clock didn't spin.
• /save NAME in the AI chat could quietly not save right after a reply, so /load NAME failed.
• Copying a picture from the clipboard history no longer adds it to the history a second time.
• Two recordings started at the same moment can't end up writing to the same file.
• A frozen window in tiling no longer makes ii keep retrying it without a pause.

If you're on 1.0.0, the update notification and the setup pick this up; your settings stay.

ii-windows 1.0.0 — Jazz-Handed Octopus

ii-windows 1.0. Everything from end4-pC is in now, in both looks, plus a lot that came out of the betas. If you're on 0.10.x, the setup and the update notification pick this up; your settings stay.

Smoother on fast monitors

• If a 144 or 200 Hz monitor felt like 60 Hz, that's fixed. With more than one window open (and ii always has several), Qt was stepping every animation at the main screen's refresh rate, so a 60 Hz main screen (or a second cable to the same monitor) held everything at 60. Animations now follow your fastest screen.
• Animations nobody can see don't run anymore (the volume dial, the wavy progress bars, the spinning clock behind other windows), and anything still animating in a hidden panel slows to a crawl, so the shell uses less CPU and GPU sitting idle.

Bar, dock and panels

• Four more bar styles: M3, M3 Hug, Panel and Split Hug, plus an OLED black option for the panels.
• The dock has a right-click menu (new window, move to a workspace, pin, close), "Dock to Panel" puts your pinned apps inside the bar, and you can choose which monitors get a dock.
• Bar extras: an updates count (winget), an avatar button, the date next to the time, switchers on the clock and resources, and a network speed widget.
• A media tab in the left sidebar, a volume dial on the media cards, and a right-click text menu in every text field.
• Now Playing: when the song changes, the cover flies out of the bar into a floating pill with the title, artists and album, then flies back. Drag it anywhere; Settings → Bar → Now Playing has the timing and size.
• The cheatsheet (Win+/) has an AI usage tab with your Claude and Codex plan limits, read from the logins on your PC. It never refreshes or stores your tokens.
• Gemini can see the files and pictures you attach in the AI chat on Windows too, and pasting a copied picture attaches it.
• A 10-band equalizer with presets and an "Auto" mode that follows the song's genre, through Equalizer APO (free, installed separately). Realtek Audio Console, MaxxAudio, Dolby, DTS, Nahimic and the other sound apps have no public API, so ii only opens them.

Wallpaper and desktop

• Transitions when the wallpaper changes, a preview while you browse, a centered wallpaper, a split blur and collages of several pictures (when ii draws the wallpaper, Settings → Background → Windows desktop).
• Drag a picture or a video from Explorer onto the desktop to make it your wallpaper. Other files still land on the desktop, and Shift drops a picture as a file.
• Unsplash, Pexels, Blapples and NA-ive in the wallpaper selector, and a carousel and wallpaper options in the desktop menu.
• Desktop widgets: weather with a forecast in five sizes, a pixel clock, visualizer styles (ring, aurora, dots, mirror), lyrics in the media widget, a vertical resources widget, and a Widgets submenu in the desktop menu.
• Presets can be renamed, exported and imported as zip files with their pictures, and shared to the community gallery through the GitHub CLI.

A System page in Settings

• Displays: resolution, refresh rate, position, main display, scale and HDR, with a 15-second "keep these settings?" countdown.
• Keyboard repeat, NumLock, mouse speed and acceleration, left-handed mode, focus follows mouse, touchpad (Windows 11), cursor scheme and size, and Windows' animations.
• Window borders in your colors and corner style (Windows 11), a master tiling layout, smart split, back-and-forth between workspaces and moving the cursor with you.
• Screen-off and sleep times, and an optional lock after inactivity (off by default).
• The apps that start with Windows (with switches, like Task Manager), and apps ii starts on a workspace of your choice.

Also new

• Web apps: type a site and get a Start menu app that opens it in its own window.
• Screen recording can add your microphone, and the system audio can be turned off in the region selector.
• The region selector finds content regions (pictures, text blocks, panels) to snap to.
• ii checks for new releases every time it starts and shows a notification with Update and What's new. Nothing installs until you confirm in the setup.

Fixes

• The crash when the monitor turns off or gets unplugged (#10), scrambled text when Google Sans Flex is also installed on Windows (#13), and "special" in the bar of a monitor plugged in while ii runs.
• Less memory: a panel closed for 10 seconds gives back its graphics memory, and the cheatsheet and media controls unload a couple of minutes after you close them.
• Shift+Win+Arrow (move window) could get caught by ii's own keyboard hook and repeat, and switching desktops without the accessor could leave Windows thinking Win was released.
• A frozen app can no longer freeze ii when you move focus away from it or make it fullscreen, and reloading or changing the wallpaper can't hang on a stuck media or video worker.
• The keybind editor saves only what you change, so new and fixed default shortcuts still reach you after an update (a file it wrote before is converted the next time you change something). Switching keyboard layouts no longer reloads every shortcut.
• Launching an app from a shortcut and creating a new desktop with Win+number no longer stall the shell, and the Now Playing pill no longer puts an invisible full-screen window over everything while it shows.
• The hover-only taskbar follows resolution and scaling changes, and brightness changes don't wait behind file indexing anymore.

ii-windows 0.10.1-fix3 — Tahiti Mangosellers

Another small fix round on 0.10.1. I was taking new screenshots for the site, applying a bunch of gallery presets one after the other, and a few things looked off, so here they are fixed.

The music card on the dock now actually sits inside the dock. It used to be a few pixels too big, poked out over the edge and had square corners, and the album cover was square too. Now it lines up with the app icons and everything is rounded like it should be.

Applying a preset could leave the left sidebar a mess: the old pages stayed drawn behind the new ones, half see-through. That's gone. Presets also don't inherit the previous preset's color scheme anymore (Glassy was coming out purple after Catppuccin), downloaded presets show their real name instead of the file name, and the imported list doesn't show a random "install-manifest" entry on first start.

Smaller stuff: with the "minimal" settings style the side menu scrolls instead of spilling out of the window, and game mode stops trying to run a Hyprland command that doesn't exist on Windows.

If you're on 0.10.1 or 0.10.1-fix2, the setup picks this up as an update.