A floating desktop organizer for Windows.
Lives in your tray. Drop files into racks on your wallpaper instead of onto your desktop. Zero clutter, zero cloud.
Keep your wallpaper clean. Drag files in, and they live one click away in a safe space.
Your desktop shouldn't be a dumping ground. Racks lives quietly in your system tray and lets you create translucent floating panels on your wallpaper. Drop files in and they leave the mess behind for a tidy, safe home you can reach in one click.
- Native and light. A fast .NET 10 WPF app, not a browser in a trench coat.
- Private. No cloud, no background indexers, no telemetry. Your files never leave your PC.
- Safe by design. You can't accidentally delete a file from inside a rack, and removing a rack never touches a real folder.
Drop a file, folder, or shortcut onto a rack and it's tidied away instantly.
- Default drop — the item is moved into the rack (off your desktop, into a private sandbox).
Ctrl+ drop — a shortcut is created instead; the original stays where it is.Shift+ drop — force a move even on a link-mode rack.- Drag an item out — it comes back to your desktop as a single file, no duplicate.
Two kinds of rack:
- Rack — a private space. Items are moved into a hidden sandbox and shown in the rack.
- Folder rack — a live window onto a real folder you pick. Nothing is moved; deleting the rack leaves the folder untouched.
Drag one rack into another and it glides away like a puck on ice — real momentum, friction, and a bounce off the screen edge. Pushes chain from rack to rack. Flick a rack and let go while it's moving and it keeps sliding. Lock a rack and it becomes a solid anchor nothing can shove. All at a smooth 60fps, and completely idle when nothing's moving.
Every rack is independent. Dial in your own colors, fonts, opacity, and icon sizes. Add a drop shadow or a gradient, drop a background image, or strip everything away for pure glass that lets your wallpaper shine through. Six one-click themes to start from. Collapse any rack to just its title bar with the chevron.
The settings panel snaps next to the rack you're editing and updates live — no Apply buttons. Real-time hex color pickers, live font previews, and one-click style copying between racks.
- No accidental deletes. The Delete option is blocked for files inside a rack, so you can't wipe a folder a rack points at. Want it gone? Drag it out first.
- Open in File Explorer — one click from any rack item to reveal the real file in its folder.
- Removing a rack returns everything to your desktop, laid out in a clean grid.
- 🪄 Magic Organizer — one click analyzes your desktop with on-device AI, groups files into smart categories, and (after you confirm) builds them into racks or folders.
- 🔍 Quick Finder —
Ctrl+Shift+Spacesearches across every rack instantly. - 🤖 Auto-Routing — set a regex per rack; new matching files landing on your desktop fly straight into it.
- 🔄 Live refresh — change a rack's folder in Explorer and the rack updates itself.
- 🖥️ Multi-monitor smart — windows open on the screen you're on; racks snap back to your primary display when a monitor is unplugged.
- 🎬 Premium polish — one coherent, animated interface across every window, from the startup sequence to every dialog.
✈️ Portable layouts — export every rack, theme, and setting to a single JSON file; restore on a new PC in one click.
Grab Racks-Setup-<version>.exe from the latest release and double-click it. The installer takes a couple of seconds, asks for no admin prompts, and drops Racks straight into your system tray. Right-click the tray icon to make your first rack.
Note
Windows SmartScreen may show a blue "Windows protected your PC" popup because Racks is an indie app without an expensive corporate signing certificate. Click More info → Run anyway. It's 100% open source and safe.
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
Ctrl+Shift+N |
New rack |
Ctrl+Shift+Space |
Quick Finder |
Ctrl + drop |
Create a shortcut, keep the original |
Shift + drop |
Force move onto a link-mode rack |
Alt + drag |
Bypass grid snapping while moving a rack |
Ctrl + scroll |
Resize icons |
F2 |
Rename the selected item |
| Scroll on title bar | Bring a rack forward / send it behind |
| Double-click wallpaper | Hide / show all racks |
Requires the .NET 10 SDK (and Inno Setup 6 for the installer).
# Run from source
dotnet build Racks/Racks.csproj -c Debug
dotnet run --project Racks/Racks.csproj
# Build the distributable installer
.\build-installer.ps1 # -> installer\Output\Racks-Setup-<version>.exeCurious how it works? ABOUT.md explains the design and gives a map of the codebase.
If Racks cleans up your workflow, drop a star. It's the best way to help others find it.
Racks is free and open source under the MIT License — see LICENSE.txt.
It incorporates code originally distributed under the MIT License; required attribution and the full upstream license texts are in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.