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.