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A Dynamic Island for Windows, with a little flame living in it (who dresses for the season and the weather). A feu follet is the will-o'-the-wisp of Québec folklore, a cousin of the Japanese hitodama. Follet speaks English and French. Demo music: My Castle Town (Lofi), XCANT.

Install

1. Download Follet-Setup-x.y.z.exe from the releases.
2. Run it: it installs for your user, no admin rights needed. The installer is not signed: on the "Windows protected your PC" screen, click More info → Run anyway.
3. Follet appears at the top of the screen and introduces itself. Turn on Start with Windows in Settings → Behavior.

The interface follows the Windows language (French or English). Change it in Settings → Appearance → Language.

To see notifications only in Follet, turn off app banners in Windows Settings → Notifications (or turn on Do not disturb): Follet reads them from the notification center.

Footprint: a 95 MB installer, about 350 MB of memory and under 2 % of the processor at rest (measured on a Ryzen 7 laptop). Turning off hardware acceleration in Settings → Behavior saves about 70 MB.

Follet checks for new versions every 6 hours and updates itself from Settings → About.

If something goes wrong, the log is in %APPDATA%\Follet\logs\follet.log.

What it does

Tab	Contents
Home	Now playing for any app that talks to Windows (Spotify, YouTube Music, browser…) with synced lyrics, a visualizer (click the art to bring the player forward), volume, audio output, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, connected Bluetooth devices and their battery, configurable tiles (apps, files, folders, websites)
Today	Clock, weather (location by IP) with a detailed page: 24-hour chart, 7 days, wind, UV, air quality, sun, and a rain-soon alert, this week's calendar (iCal), notification history, timers, Pomodoro and a stopwatch shown in the notch, tasks
Stats	5-minute CPU (real clock speed), NVIDIA GPU and RAM charts, top apps, network throughput and speed test, storage. Terminal button: fastfetch-style system info
Shelf	Drop files on the notch, even collapsed, to keep them handy, then drag them into any app. Ctrl+Alt+S drops a screenshot there
Screen tools	Ctrl+Alt+T copies the text of any area of the screen (read offline by the OCR built into Windows), Ctrl+Alt+C is a color picker with a magnifier that copies the #hex code. Both can also be home tiles
Copied	The last 50 copied texts and images (in memory only), pinned items, search. Ctrl+Alt+V opens it and Enter pastes into the app you were in
Apps	Launcher with search and favorites, based on the Start menu
Terminal	Full shell (PowerShell 7 by default)
Follet	The AI of your choice: Claude Code (your subscription), Claude API, OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama (local), OpenRouter or a compatible server. Reads the text files you drop on it. Usage dashboard: 5-hour window, tokens, messages, hour by hour, by model, by project
Power	Lock, sleep, sign out, restart, shut down
Settings	Language, colors (ready-made themes, pure black for OLED screens), Follet's color, notch size and position, display, shortcut, activities, visible tabs and their order, weather, calendars, AI, settings backup (export / import)

Live activities. When collapsed, the notch widens for a few seconds when something happens: a Windows notification, a calendar reminder, a download (then on the Shelf), volume, a new song, headphones connected, Bluetooth devices (with their battery), charger, low battery, timer done, file dropped. An orange dot stays in the notch while an app is recording your microphone, like on iPhone. It also warns when the graphics card or processor overheats. Focus mode (home tile or right-click on the notch) pauses activities for an hour, until morning or until you turn it off.

Follet has moods. Headphones while music plays, a halo while the AI thinks, a wink when the answer arrives, a nightcap after 5 idle minutes, big eyes for alerts.

Gestures.

• Hover: preview, only if the mouse lingers (just passing by on the way to a browser tab does not open it; the delay is adjustable). Scroll down or click: full panel. Esc or move the mouse away: close.
• On the collapsed notch: two-finger swipe (or Shift+wheel) for the next or previous song, middle click to play or pause. The wheel can adjust the volume instead of opening (Settings → Behavior).
• Ctrl+Alt+Space (configurable) opens and closes Follet from anywhere.
• With the notch open: 1 to 9 to pick a tab, ← / → or the scroll wheel on the tabs.
• In front of a maximized window the notch tucks away; it comes back when the mouse rests for a moment at the top middle of the screen. It disappears during full-screen games.

Material You. The whole theme comes from the current album art, the Windows accent color, or a color you pick.

Privacy

• Personal data (config, tasks, shelf, favorites, chats, API keys encrypted by Windows) stays in %APPDATA%\Follet, never in the project folder.
• The clipboard history stays in memory, never on disk; only the items you pin are saved (in %APPDATA%\Follet).
• No telemetry, no analytics, no account. Follet only contacts the services below, for the features that need them.
• External services: GitHub (checks for a new release every 6 hours), ipwho.is / geojs.io (approximate location by IP, can be turned off), Open-Meteo (weather and air quality), speed.cloudflare.com (speed test, on demand), LRCLIB (song lyrics: artist and title of the current song, can be turned off), the iCal calendars you add, and the AI provider you choose.

Development

Requirements: Windows 10/11 and Node.js 20+. Optional: PowerShell 7 (pwsh) for the terminal, Claude Code for subscription AI, Libre Hardware Monitor (web server, port 8085) for CPU temperature, an NVIDIA card for GPU stats.

npm install
npm start

Command	Effect
npm start	Runs Follet from source
npm run check	Checks syntax, ASCII-only helper.ps1 and versions (also run by GitHub Actions)
npm run dist	Builds dist\Follet-Setup-<version>.exe

If npm blocks Electron's install script: npm install-scripts approve electron.

Translations

The source is written in French. The English UI comes from src/i18n/en.js: exact strings, plus patterns for text with numbers. When you add French text to the interface, add its English there. node scripts/i18n-extract.js lists strings with no translation, and FOLLET_EVAL="I.i18nMissing()" lists the ones seen on screen with the app in English.

Releasing

1. Add a section to CHANGELOG.md.
2. npm version x.y.z --no-git-tag-version, then commit.
3. git push, then git tag vx.y.z and git push origin vx.y.z.

GitHub Actions builds the installer and publishes the release with the CHANGELOG text.

Testing without a mouse

• FOLLET_DEMO=<tab> opens Follet expanded on a tab (home, today, stats, shelf, clip, apps, term, ai, power, settings, or welcome); FOLLET_DEMO=1 cycles through them.
• FOLLET_EVAL="<JS expression>" writes the result to the log, for example I.activity({kind:'volume', level:42}).
• FOLLET_CAPTURE=path.png (with FOLLET_EVAL) saves a screenshot of the notch; add FOLLET_CAPTURE_FRAMES=60 (and FOLLET_CAPTURE_MS=66) for a frame sequence, like the animations in this README.
• FOLLET_FAKE_MEDIA=track.json replaces what is playing (title, artist, art, duration, position) and colors the theme from the art.

Layout

src/main/
  main.js        startup, tray icon, global shortcut
  core.js        paths, config, state, log, network helpers
  window.js      window, mouse capture, hover intent, tucking, full screen
  helper.js      bridge to helper.ps1
  helper.ps1     Windows PowerShell 5.1: WinRT media, volume, audio output, battery,
                 radios, processes, windows, notifications (ASCII only)
  theme.js       Material You colors (material-color-utilities)
  monitors.js    music, volume, audio output, battery -> activities
  notifs.js      Windows notifications -> activities
  privacy.js     apps recording the microphone -> orange dot
  lyrics.js      synced lyrics from LRCLIB
  bluetooth.js   connected Bluetooth devices -> activities
  screenshot.js  Ctrl+Alt+S -> screenshot on the Shelf
  downloads.js   browser downloads -> progress chip, then the Shelf
  focus.js       focus mode (pauses activities)
  heat.js        heat alert (nvidia-smi, Libre Hardware Monitor)
  picker.js      Ctrl+Alt+T screen text (Windows OCR), Ctrl+Alt+C color picker
  update.js      updates from GitHub releases
  ai.js          AI providers, encrypted keys, usage
  i18n.js        main-process translation (tray menu)
  stats.js  today.js  tools.js  terminal.js  settings.js
  preload.js     secure bridge to the interface
src/i18n/en.js   English strings
src/renderer/
  css/m3.css     Material 3 tokens and components
  css/notch.css  notch and tabs
  js/i18n.js     interface translation
  js/mascot.js   the mascot (canvas, moods)
  js/core.js     notch states, activities, drag and drop
  js/views/      one file per tab
scripts/         checks, release notes, translation extraction

Code signing policy

Windows releases are built from this repository by GitHub Actions, from the tagged commit only. Code signing through the SignPath Foundation is requested; until it is granted, the installer is not signed.

• Committers and reviewers: XCANT
• Approvers (each signed release is approved by hand): XCANT
• Privacy: see Privacy. Follet sends nothing to any server other than the ones listed there.

Contributing

Bug reports, ideas and pull requests are welcome: see CONTRIBUTING.md. Security issues: SECURITY.md.

License

MIT © XCANT

Inspiration

The look is inspired by Hitodama and macOS notches (boring.notch, NotchNook, Alcove). Follet is not affiliated with any of these projects.