Work Time Visualizer

A lightweight Windows taskbar widget that shows your daily and weekly work-time progress as colored block bars — built in Rust using the Win32 API.

What it does

Day  [■][■][■][■][■][□][□][□][□][□]  50%
Wk   [■][■][■][■][■][■][□][□][□][□]  62%

• Day bar — progress from your configured start time (default 8 am) to end time (default 4 pm). Shows 0% before work starts and 100% after it ends.
• Week bar — progress from Monday 8 am through Friday 4 pm.
• Weekends — both bars fill to 100% and show a configurable label (default Weekend!).
• Refreshes every 15 seconds automatically.
• Right-click the widget to open the config file or exit.

Requirements

• Windows 10 or 11 (x64)
• Rust toolchain (stable)

Build

git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/work-time-visualizer-rust.git
cd work-time-visualizer-rust
cargo build --release

The compiled binary will be at target\release\work-time-visualizer.exe.

Run

cargo run
# or after building:
.\target\release\work-time-visualizer.exe

The widget appears at the bottom-right of your screen, just above the taskbar.

Configuration

On first run a config file is created at:

%APPDATA%\WorkTimeVisualizer\config.json

Right-click the widget and choose Settings to open it in your default editor.

{
  "schedule": {
    "start_hour": 8,
    "start_minute": 0,
    "end_hour": 16,
    "end_minute": 0
  },
  "colors": {
    "day_filled":     "#4CAF50",
    "day_empty":      "#2D2D2D",
    "week_filled":    "#2196F3",
    "week_empty":     "#2D2D2D",
    "background":     "#1A1A1A",
    "text_color":     "#CCCCCC",
    "weekend_filled": "#9C27B0"
  },
  "display": {
    "blocks":          10,
    "show_percentage": true,
    "weekend_label":   "Weekend!"
  }
}

Restart the app after saving changes.

Color reference

Key	Default	Controls
day_filled	#4CAF50	Filled blocks on the Day bar
day_empty	#2D2D2D	Empty blocks on the Day bar
week_filled	#2196F3	Filled blocks on the Week bar
week_empty	#2D2D2D	Empty blocks on the Week bar
background	#1A1A1A	Widget background
text_color	#CCCCCC	Labels and percentage text
weekend_filled	#9C27B0	Block color on weekends

Run on startup

1. Build the release binary.
2. Press Win + R, type shell:startup, press Enter.
3. Create a shortcut to work-time-visualizer.exe in that folder.

Project structure

src/
├── main.rs           # Entry point + single-instance guard
├── window.rs         # Win32 window creation, message loop, GDI renderer
├── config.rs         # JSON config — load/save with serde
├── time_calc.rs      # Daily and weekly progress math (uses GetLocalTime)
├── theme.rs          # Windows dark/light mode detection via registry
└── native_interop.rs # Win32 helpers: Color, taskbar rect, DPI, etc.

License

MIT