A calm, dark-mode-first desktop timer for Windows — countdown timers and clock-time alarms that nudge you with a quiet corner card instead of a flashy notification.
Tidsro is Norwegian: tid (time) + ro (calm / peace) — roughly "calm time." The name is the whole idea: a timer that's visible when you need it and invisible when you don't.
Anyone who works or studies at a computer and wants to hold their focus through the day without reaching for a phone or juggling several apps. Set your day — or your whole week — once, then forget it: Tidsro runs quietly in the background and keeps you on track, so your phone can stay on Do Not Disturb or in another room. It's built to hold your attention, not grab it — no flashy notifications, nothing loud unless you ask for it. Every alarm is yours to shape: silent or with a chime, one-off or repeating.
Why I built it. I went looking for a focus tool while studying and couldn't find one that did both timers and recurring alarms while staying clean and minimal — so I built the one I wish I'd had before I started school. It turns out to be just as useful in a workday as a study day.
v1.6.0 is released — see the Releases page. Tidsro does countdown timers (presets or custom, with pause/resume, reset, an optional label, and a per-timer sound) and a Schedule of clock-time and recurring alarms — fire once at an HH:MM time, or repeat on a weekday set (Daily, Weekdays, Weekends, or custom days). Each alarm takes an optional label, a per-alarm sound, and an optional 5-minute pre-alarm warning; the Schedule is sorted by next occurrence, alarms can be switched off without deleting (kept and parked at the bottom until switched back on), edited in a dialog, and deleted with an undo window, and firing survives sleep and app-relaunch within a 5-minute grace. Settings (launch-at-startup, default sound) apply on Save.
See the changelog for what's new in each release.
Most people — install it:
- Open the Releases page and download
Tidsro-Setup.exefrom the latest release. - Run it. Windows may warn "Windows protected your PC" because the app isn't code-signed yet — click More info → Run anyway.
- Click through the short wizard. Tidsro installs just for you (no admin), adds a Start Menu shortcut, and starts in the system tray.
Uninstall any time from Settings → Apps → Installed apps → Tidsro.
Prefer not to install? Download Tidsro.exe (the portable build) from the same release and double-click it — it runs as-is, no installation. The same SmartScreen note applies.
Both builds are self-contained: they run on any 64-bit Windows PC with no .NET required. Your timers and settings stay on your machine in %AppData%\Tidsro.
Launching Tidsro opens its window — it remembers where you last placed it and how big it was. Closing the window tucks Tidsro back into the system tray, where it keeps running until you choose Quit from the tray menu; left-click the tray icon any time to reopen it. When Tidsro is started automatically with Windows, it stays quietly in the tray.
- Pick a preset (5 / 30 / 60 min) or type a custom duration:
25(minutes),5:00(mm:ss), or1:30:00(h:mm:ss) — with an optional label to tell timers apart. Invalid input shows a calm inline message. - Choose a sound for the next timer from the dropdown — ▶ previews it. It starts from your default sound and applies to both presets and custom timers.
- Multiple countdowns can run at once, stacked soonest-first; each shows a live mm:ss (or h:mm:ss) countdown with pause/resume, reset (back to the full duration), and cancel — cancelling drops a brief Undo bar at the bottom. Paused timers dim and drop below the active ones; resetting while paused keeps the timer stopped at the start.
- When a timer finishes, a calm card appears in the bottom-right corner. It does not steal focus.
- +5 arms a new 5-minute countdown. Restart re-runs the original duration. Dismiss closes the card.
- Press Ctrl+Alt+T to bring the latest card into keyboard focus; Tab reaches the buttons; Enter activates; focus returns to your previous app on dismiss.
- Multiple finished cards stack upward and dismiss independently.
A finished timer surfaces as a calm corner card — it never steals focus.
The Schedule lives below the countdown list. Type a time — 14:30, or shorthand like 9, 930, or 1430 (24-hour) — an optional label, choose a sound, set Repeat (Once, or a weekday set), and click Add (or press Enter). The alarm is saved immediately. Turn on Warn me 5 minutes before for a quiet heads-up ahead of the alarm.
- A one-shot alarm fires once; a recurring alarm repeats on its days, and the Schedule stays sorted by what's next.
- If Tidsro isn't running when an alarm time passes, it fires within a 5-minute grace window on next launch.
- Each alarm row shows its time, cadence, label, and sound. Click Edit (pencil) to change it in a dialog; Save commits, Cancel discards.
- Delete removes the alarm with a brief undo window — click Undo in the bar at the bottom to restore it.
- Switch an alarm off with the toggle on its row to keep it without it firing or warning — handy for pausing recurring alarms over a holiday — then switch it back on when you need it. Off alarms dim and drop to the bottom of the Schedule, and stay off across restarts.
- When an alarm fires, the same quiet bottom-right card appears, with Snooze +5 (re-arms it 5 minutes later in the Schedule) and Dismiss.
Editing an alarm — per-alarm sound, repeat, and the optional 5-minute warning.
- Open Settings (bottom-left of the main window) to toggle launch-at-startup and choose a default sound. Changes apply when you click Save; Cancel, Esc, or closing the window discards them.
- Cloud sync / backup
C# · WPF (.NET) · MVVM. Local-first: no accounts, no network — your data stays on your machine.
Run it directly:
dotnet run --project src/Tidsro
Build the distributable downloads into dist/ with publish.ps1:
./publish.ps1
It publishes a self-contained, single-file Tidsro.exe (portable) and wraps it in Tidsro-Setup.exe (a per-user installer) with Inno Setup — install that once via winget install --id JRSoftware.InnoSetup -e. Attach both .exe files to a GitHub Release.
Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE. © 2026 Malin Fossum.