How to use rainmeter to customize your windows desktop
By Daniel Kim
Anthony Heddings is the resident cloud engineer for LifeSavvy Media, a technical writer, programmer, and an expert at Amazon’s AWS platform. He’s written hundreds of articles for How-To Geek and CloudSavvy IT that have been read millions of times. Read more.
Rainmeter is a lightweight application for customizing your Windows desktop. Rainmeter works by installing community made ‘skins’, many of which can change how the desktop works with widgets like app launchers, RSS and email readers, calendars, weather reports, and many others. It has been around since Windows XP, where it was used as a tool for displaying basic info on the desktop, but has since gained a large community following which has produced high quality skins which can change the whole desktop experience.
Installing Rainmeter
Rainmeter is an open source program and can be downloaded from their official website. If you want the latest updates, you can also build it from the source code at their Github repository.
Rainmeter can be installed portably as well, but it isn’t recommended. The standard installation works just fine.
Installation is simple, but make sure “Launch Rainmeter on startup” is checked, or else it will have to be manually restarted after a reboot.
Once Rainmeter is installed, you should see a few new things on your desktop, displaying basic things like disk and CPU usage. This is Rainmeter’s default skin.
To get to Rainmeter’s settings, right click on any one of the skins and click “Manage Skin”. A window will come up listing all your installed skins. Clicking “Active Skins” will let you manage each one individually.
You can edit the positioning and settings of each skin. If you want to make not draggable, unclick “Draggable” and click “Click through”. This will also disable the right click menu, but fortunately Rainmeter adds an icon in the Windows toolbar, which also lets you access the menu.
Finding and Installing Skins
Rainmeter’s default skin is useful, but fairly boring. Many sites exist for showcasing Rainmeter skins, including DeviantArt, Customize.org, and the Rainmeter subreddit. Sorting by “Top – All Time” on the subreddit brings up some of the best skins and layouts. Skins from these sites can be downloaded and mixed and matched to your choosing. Some skins, like Enigma, are essentially entire Rainmeter suites by themselves.
To install a skin, just double click on the .rmskin file. Rainmeter’s window will pop up allowing you to install and enable the skin. For some skins, there are lots of different features, so if you don’t want everything loaded at once, uncheck “Load included skins”, and Rainmeter will simply just add them to your list of skins.
Tweaking Rainmeter
Rainmeter allows for an amazing amount of customization. If you want to get your hands dirty with the code behind the skins, it isn’t too complex. Right click on a skin and hit “Edit skin”, which will bring up a configuration file with lots of variable definitions.
For example, if you wanted to change the color of the outer rim of this clock, you can edit the values of the variable that controls that. Most skins have comments in the configuration file, so it’s easy to tell what controls what.
Alternatives to Rainmeter
If you’re on a Mac or Linux, unfortunately you’re out of luck, as there isn’t a Rainmeter build for OS X or Linux. For Mac users, there is Geektool, which performs many of the same basic functions such as displaying info on the desktop and some basic widgets, though there isn’t as big of a community following behind it, so the options for skins are limited. Geektool is also much more oriented towards people who are familiar with the command line, as it runs nearly entirely on bash scripts.
Windows is not a very customizable operating system. Sure it lets you install themes, but they are but a mere bunch of wallpapers. You can change the size of your taskbar icons and even make the Windows taskbar fully transparent. But if you’re expecting something major you might be disappointed. Microsoft seemed to be moving towards a more personalized desktop experience with widgets on Windows Vista. As you know, not everything went according to the plan though. Widgets were eventually killed off with the arrival of Windows 8 and it’s live tiles. But Windows is the most popular desktop OS and that means there are always some third-party apps you can use to customize your Windows experience. One such app is Rainmeter, which you may not have heard of.
Rainmeter is a powerful desktop customization tool that lets you create a dynamic information-rich heads-up display. With Rainmeter you can view your RSS feed, monitor system usage, see the weather and much more. If you’re eager to learn or have the ability to Google, you can even create an Iron Man-like HUD. for your Windows desktop. It is what desktop widgets could have been had Microsoft not abandoned them. Rainmeter has a ton of customization options that let you personalize every pixel of your desktop to your liking. It’s powerful, beautiful, and fantastic which might lead you to the question, “Why haven’t I heard of it?”
The answer to it would be that unfortunately, it is not very user-friendly. But that’s why we’re here, to make things simpler for you. If you want your PC to switch between dark and light themes automatically at a designated time, you can do that with Windows 10 auto night mode.
Install Rainmeter
Installing Rainmeter is as simple as installing any program is on a Windows PC. Download the Rainmeter set up file from the download link above and double click on it once downloaded to launch the installer. You can choose to do a standard install or a portable install, in which case everything will be installed in a single folder. If you’re not planning on taking your entire Rainmeter set up along with you on a flash drive, it is best to do a standard install. Once it is installed, check the box in the installer window next to Run Rainmeter, then click Finish.
Rainmeter Terminology
Now that you have it installed, you’ll see some stuff pop up on your desktop, similar to the screenshot above. Before you start, it is best to learn the Rainmeter terminology. Luckily there is not a lot of it but it can still get a bit confusing. So here’s a quick summary of what these terms are.
- Skins: Usually, one would imagine skins refer to how a Rainmeter widget looks like. but that’s not the case here. The term “skin” refers to what the widget is rather than what it looks like. They’re small apps that live on your desktop but underneath your Windows. So skins are basically what we call “Widgets”.
- Skin Suites: Skin suites are a bunch of similar-looking widgets by a creator. For example, the different widgets/skins you see on your desktop when launching Rainmeter for the first time constitute a skin suite called “illustro”. It is the default skin suit that ships with Rainmeter. You can mix skins from different suites, but it wouldn’t necessarily look very cohesive, so in general, you want to stick to a specific suite.
- Layouts: A layout defines the position of the skins on your desktop. Generally, skin suites already have a pre-defined layout that you can choose to load while installing. You can also save your current layout and reload it later.
Basic functions
Once you’re familiar with the terms, using Rainmeter is not very difficult. At least the basic things like loading or unloading skins (or skin suites) is not that hard. When you have Rainmeter running, you will see a raindrop icon on your system tray which you can click anytime to manage your skins. You can also right-click on a skin to access several options, including the option to unload the skin.
In the Rainmeter manager window, you can see all your installed skin suites in a column on the left. Here you can select individual skins from different suites and click the Load/Unload button to load or unload them.
Skins can be dragged around the desktop so you can easily place them wherever you see fit. Once you are satisfied with a layout, you can save it by going to the Layout tab. Here, you can give a name to your layout, before you click the Save button.
Install Rainmeter Skins
You can check out the Rainmeter forums, the DeviantART group, or the subreddit to find a huge community of fans who make and share their skins. Here is a hand-picked list of the 5 best Rainmeter skins for Windows 10. Downloaded skins usually come with a .rmskin file which you can double click. This will bring up a pop-up window where you can click Install to install the skin.
In case a skin does not contain a .rmskin file, it will usually be in a .zip or .rar format. To install such skins, follow these steps.
- Download the .zip or .rar file containing the skins you want.
- Extract the contents of the folder to \Documents\Rainmeter\Skins on your computer.
- Once extracted, right-click the Rainmeter icon in your system tray.
- Click Refresh All.
The skin should now be available in the Rainmeter manager window. That was pretty much all the basic stuff you needed to know about Rainmeter. You can now go ahead and spend hours customizing your Windows desktop like you never thought possible.
Rainmeter’s basic purpose is to run skins. A skin is a movable, dynamic, sometimes-interactive window that appears over the Windows desktop, and usually gathers and displays information of some kind.
Skins come with many different sizes, styles, user interfaces, and levels of complexity. Rainmeter includes utilities for publishing and installing 3rd-party skins. Each skin is generally stored and loaded as an independent, self-contained module.
Files and Folders
All skins are stored in Rainmeter’s “Skins” folder. If Rainmeter has been installed normally, the default location of the Skins folder is:
If Rainmeter is installed as a portable application, the Skins folder is found in the installation folder. The Skins folder can also be changed in Rainmeter’s settings.
A skin is stored as a named .ini text file e.g. SkinName.ini in its own named folder within Skins, as in: Rainmeter\Skins\SkinFolder\SkinName.ini .
All of these folder paths may be referenced in a skin as built-in-variables.
Variants
If a single folder contains multiple SkinName1.ini , SkinName2.ini . etc. files, they are each considered variants of the same skin. Only one variant can be active at a time, and all variants use the same settings. Separate skins not to be treated as variants must be stored in separate folders.
Variants:
C:\Users\YourName\Documents\Rainmeter\Skins\illustro\Clock\12HrClock.ini
C:\Users\YourName\Documents\Rainmeter\Skins\illustro\Clock\24HrClock.ini
Separate skins:
C:\Users\YourName\Documents\Rainmeter\Skins\illustro\12HrClock\Clock.ini
C:\Users\YourName\Documents\Rainmeter\Skins\illustro\24HrClock\Clock.ini
@Resources
Any supporting files used by the skin, such as images, addon executables, sounds, or Lua scripts, should also be stored in the skin folder. Complex skins are recommended to store supporting files in a folder called @Resources inside the root config folder. The @Resources folder is used by Rainmeter to load custom fonts and custom cursors.
Config
Each skin is identified with a certain config name. The config name is based on the path from the main Skins folder to the skin file. For example, if a skin is located at.
C:\Users\YourName\Documents\Rainmeter\Skins\illustro\Clock\Clock.ini
. then the config name would be:
Because skins may have any number of variants, many Rainmeter features, especially bangs, refer to a specific skin by its config name, rather than the skin’s filename.
Root config
Skins may also be stored in subfolders within the same root config folder. They share the same @Resources folder, and are packaged and installed together. Otherwise, Rainmeter treats each subfolder as a separate config.
For example, the following skins belong to the “illustro” suite:
C:\Users\YourName\Documents\Rainmeter\Skins\illustro\Clock\Clock.ini
C:\Users\YourName\Documents\Rainmeter\Skins\illustro\Network\Network.ini
This means that they are both located in the same root config folder, “illustro,” in the main Skins directory.
C:\Users\YourName\Documents\Rainmeter\Skins\illustro\
The root config folder for a skin will ALWAYS be directly under C:\Users\YourName\Documents\Rainmeter\Skins\ . No matter how many levels of folders your suite of skins may have, there will always be a single, shared root config folder for that suite of skins, directly under the ..Skins\ folder. This is where the @Resources folder must be.
Each skin has a unique config name:
But since they belong to the same root config, they share the same @Resources folder:
C:\Users\YourName\Documents\Rainmeter\Skins\illustro\@Resources\
A suite is an informal term for skins that are organized together in this manner. Suites are often used by skin authors to make a set of skins that share a common style, or complement each other in some way. If a root config folder contains only one SkinName.ini file, then the config and root config are the same, and the skin can be stored, packaged and installed by itself.
Format
The SkinName.ini file is written as a standard INI file, which uses the following format:
Each property of the skin is defined by a section. Each key is an option that modifies that property. The following sections may be used in skins:
[Rainmeter]
Defines options that affect the entire skin.
[Variables]
Defines text strings that can be used throughout the skin.
Measures
Objects that retrieve (or “measure”) information of some kind.
Meters
Objects that display information and other visual elements.
MeterStyles
Define options that may be used by several meters.
[Metadata]
Defines the name, version, license, and other non-functional information about the skin.
A skin must have at least one meter. All other properties are optional, and may not even be present, depending on what is needed for the skin. For skins that are publicly distributed, the [Metadata] section is strongly recommended.
There are only a few rules about using the INI format:
- All section names in a skin must be unique.
- All option names within a section must be unique.
- Section and option names should include alphanumeric characters only (no spaces or punctuation).
- Option values must be kept on a single line.
“Quotes” are not needed around strings used as an option value. Rainmeter will ignore quotes around option values.
Update
When a skin is loaded, it updates on a regular cycle. The length of time between updates is defined by the Update option in the [Rainmeter] section, and defaults to 1 second (or 1000 milliseconds). The update determines when the skin reacts to changes in the values of variables, measures and options.
Individual meters and measures can be made to update more slowly by “skipping” cycles, using the UpdateDivider option. In addition, the !Update bang forces the skin to update immediately, resetting the timed cycle.
Refresh
When a skin refreshes, all values are reset, and the skin starts over as if it had just been loaded for the first time. Refreshing also applies any changes that have been made to the code in SkinName.ini .
A skin can be refreshed from the context menus, or using the !Refresh bang.
Anthony Heddings is the resident cloud engineer for LifeSavvy Media, a technical writer, programmer, and an expert at Amazon’s AWS platform. He’s written hundreds of articles for How-To Geek and CloudSavvy IT that have been read millions of times. Read more.
Rainmeter is a lightweight application for customizing your Windows desktop. Rainmeter works by installing community made ‘skins’, many of which can change how the desktop works with widgets like app launchers, RSS and email readers, calendars, weather reports, and many others. It has been around since Windows XP, where it was used as a tool for displaying basic info on the desktop, but has since gained a large community following which has produced high quality skins which can change the whole desktop experience.
Installing Rainmeter
Rainmeter is an open source program and can be downloaded from their official website. If you want the latest updates, you can also build it from the source code at their Github repository.
Rainmeter can be installed portably as well, but it isn’t recommended. The standard installation works just fine.
Installation is simple, but make sure “Launch Rainmeter on startup” is checked, or else it will have to be manually restarted after a reboot.
Once Rainmeter is installed, you should see a few new things on your desktop, displaying basic things like disk and CPU usage. This is Rainmeter’s default skin.
To get to Rainmeter’s settings, right click on any one of the skins and click “Manage Skin”. A window will come up listing all your installed skins. Clicking “Active Skins” will let you manage each one individually.
You can edit the positioning and settings of each skin. If you want to make not draggable, unclick “Draggable” and click “Click through”. This will also disable the right click menu, but fortunately Rainmeter adds an icon in the Windows toolbar, which also lets you access the menu.
Finding and Installing Skins
Rainmeter’s default skin is useful, but fairly boring. Many sites exist for showcasing Rainmeter skins, including DeviantArt, Customize.org, and the Rainmeter subreddit. Sorting by “Top – All Time” on the subreddit brings up some of the best skins and layouts. Skins from these sites can be downloaded and mixed and matched to your choosing. Some skins, like Enigma, are essentially entire Rainmeter suites by themselves.
To install a skin, just double click on the .rmskin file. Rainmeter’s window will pop up allowing you to install and enable the skin. For some skins, there are lots of different features, so if you don’t want everything loaded at once, uncheck “Load included skins”, and Rainmeter will simply just add them to your list of skins.
Tweaking Rainmeter
Rainmeter allows for an amazing amount of customization. If you want to get your hands dirty with the code behind the skins, it isn’t too complex. Right click on a skin and hit “Edit skin”, which will bring up a configuration file with lots of variable definitions.
For example, if you wanted to change the color of the outer rim of this clock, you can edit the values of the variable that controls that. Most skins have comments in the configuration file, so it’s easy to tell what controls what.
Alternatives to Rainmeter
If you’re on a Mac or Linux, unfortunately you’re out of luck, as there isn’t a Rainmeter build for OS X or Linux. For Mac users, there is Geektool, which performs many of the same basic functions such as displaying info on the desktop and some basic widgets, though there isn’t as big of a community following behind it, so the options for skins are limited. Geektool is also much more oriented towards people who are familiar with the command line, as it runs nearly entirely on bash scripts.
A: How To Download And Install Rainmeter
1. The first step is to download and install the latest Rainmeter release, download it from here : Rainmeter.net
2. Now locate the file you downloaded and double click on it or right-click and select “open” to install the file. For our example, the file is located on my desktop.
3. After you lunch the setup, you will be greeted with the Rainmeter installation window, just like the one on the preview below. You will have two options, “Standard”or “Portable” , we recommend the standard installation for maximum compatibility with all skins. click the next button and wait till full installation.
B: How To Launch And Setup Rainmeter
1. After installation, Rainmeter automatically loads its default skins named “Illustro”. To open the Rainmeter settings menu, you will have to launch it from the windows notification section on the task bar or you can simply search for “Rainmeter” on the windows search bar from windows Menu.
2. Once open, the Rainmeter manager will look like on the screenshot below, You will have 3 different tabs.The “skin” tab is where all the skins you own will be located and you can load/unload them from there, you can also change many other skin properties using the bottom right boxes. The second tab is the layout tabs and this section will contain all the layouts you saved, finally you get the settings tab from which you can change the language and edit some basic functions.
C: How To Download And Install Skins
1. You will find a selection of nice skins from rainmeterui.com or you can search for Rainmeter skins on deviantart.com
2. Once you have downloaded a skin, it will look like in the preview below, double click on it or right click and select open to install it. After the installation is complete, you will be able to find it in the rainmeter manager skins tab, you can then load it from there.
Windows is not a very customizable operating system. Sure it lets you install themes, but they are but a mere bunch of wallpapers. You can change the size of your taskbar icons and even make the Windows taskbar fully transparent. But if you’re expecting something major you might be disappointed. Microsoft seemed to be moving towards a more personalized desktop experience with widgets on Windows Vista. As you know, not everything went according to the plan though. Widgets were eventually killed off with the arrival of Windows 8 and it’s live tiles. But Windows is the most popular desktop OS and that means there are always some third-party apps you can use to customize your Windows experience. One such app is Rainmeter, which you may not have heard of.
Rainmeter is a powerful desktop customization tool that lets you create a dynamic information-rich heads-up display. With Rainmeter you can view your RSS feed, monitor system usage, see the weather and much more. If you’re eager to learn or have the ability to Google, you can even create an Iron Man-like HUD. for your Windows desktop. It is what desktop widgets could have been had Microsoft not abandoned them. Rainmeter has a ton of customization options that let you personalize every pixel of your desktop to your liking. It’s powerful, beautiful, and fantastic which might lead you to the question, “Why haven’t I heard of it?”
The answer to it would be that unfortunately, it is not very user-friendly. But that’s why we’re here, to make things simpler for you. If you want your PC to switch between dark and light themes automatically at a designated time, you can do that with Windows 10 auto night mode.
Install Rainmeter
Installing Rainmeter is as simple as installing any program is on a Windows PC. Download the Rainmeter set up file from the download link above and double click on it once downloaded to launch the installer. You can choose to do a standard install or a portable install, in which case everything will be installed in a single folder. If you’re not planning on taking your entire Rainmeter set up along with you on a flash drive, it is best to do a standard install. Once it is installed, check the box in the installer window next to Run Rainmeter, then click Finish.
Rainmeter Terminology
Now that you have it installed, you’ll see some stuff pop up on your desktop, similar to the screenshot above. Before you start, it is best to learn the Rainmeter terminology. Luckily there is not a lot of it but it can still get a bit confusing. So here’s a quick summary of what these terms are.
- Skins: Usually, one would imagine skins refer to how a Rainmeter widget looks like. but that’s not the case here. The term “skin” refers to what the widget is rather than what it looks like. They’re small apps that live on your desktop but underneath your Windows. So skins are basically what we call “Widgets”.
- Skin Suites: Skin suites are a bunch of similar-looking widgets by a creator. For example, the different widgets/skins you see on your desktop when launching Rainmeter for the first time constitute a skin suite called “illustro”. It is the default skin suit that ships with Rainmeter. You can mix skins from different suites, but it wouldn’t necessarily look very cohesive, so in general, you want to stick to a specific suite.
- Layouts: A layout defines the position of the skins on your desktop. Generally, skin suites already have a pre-defined layout that you can choose to load while installing. You can also save your current layout and reload it later.
Basic functions
Once you’re familiar with the terms, using Rainmeter is not very difficult. At least the basic things like loading or unloading skins (or skin suites) is not that hard. When you have Rainmeter running, you will see a raindrop icon on your system tray which you can click anytime to manage your skins. You can also right-click on a skin to access several options, including the option to unload the skin.
In the Rainmeter manager window, you can see all your installed skin suites in a column on the left. Here you can select individual skins from different suites and click the Load/Unload button to load or unload them.
Skins can be dragged around the desktop so you can easily place them wherever you see fit. Once you are satisfied with a layout, you can save it by going to the Layout tab. Here, you can give a name to your layout, before you click the Save button.
Install Rainmeter Skins
You can check out the Rainmeter forums, the DeviantART group, or the subreddit to find a huge community of fans who make and share their skins. Here is a hand-picked list of the 5 best Rainmeter skins for Windows 10. Downloaded skins usually come with a .rmskin file which you can double click. This will bring up a pop-up window where you can click Install to install the skin.
In case a skin does not contain a .rmskin file, it will usually be in a .zip or .rar format. To install such skins, follow these steps.
- Download the .zip or .rar file containing the skins you want.
- Extract the contents of the folder to \Documents\Rainmeter\Skins on your computer.
- Once extracted, right-click the Rainmeter icon in your system tray.
- Click Refresh All.
The skin should now be available in the Rainmeter manager window. That was pretty much all the basic stuff you needed to know about Rainmeter. You can now go ahead and spend hours customizing your Windows desktop like you never thought possible.
Introduction: Using Rainmeter to Customize Windows
Rainmeter is a program that allows Windows users to personalize their desktop environment. With a wide range of customization programs called skins, users can go beyond changing their desktop backgrounds or taskbar colors to create a desktop that works for their needs and personal tastes. Basic installation and use requires no special computer skills, making Rainmeter a fast and easy way to improve your desktop experience. A rich online community provides tons of information and skins to help users customize their desktop.
Materials:
- Windows computer with internet access
Step 1: Download Rainmeter
- Go to and find the Download section on the homepage.
- Click the download button for the Final Release version of Rainmeter.
- In my case, it was version 4.0.
Step 2: Install Rainmeter
- An executable should pop up in your browser.
- An executable (.exe file) is a file that can perform a variety of tasks on your computer.
- In this case, it runs the installer.
- Click the executable to run the installer for Rainmeter.
- When the installer pops up, keep the default installation settings and click “Next” and then “Install”.
- After Rainmeter has finished installing, it should automatically run.
- In Rainmeter, each visual component is called a skin.
- The standard installation for Rainmeter includes a basic skin package that includes a welcome screen skin, a clock skin, and a few other skins. These are just placeholders and will be replaced with more usable options in subsequent steps.
Step 3: Set Up Desktop for Rainmeter
Right now, your desktop probably has a bunch of shortcuts and a taskbar on one side of the screen. We don’t want these to be in the way of our Rainmeter skins, so we’re going to hide them.
- First, we’ll hide the desktop icons
- Right click an area of the desktop free of any shortcuts
- A menu should pop up to the side of your cursor
- Hover over the “view” option at the top of the menu
- A second menu should pop up
- Click on the “Show desktop icons” option at the bottom of the menu
- Your icons should disappear from the desktop
- Right click an area of the desktop free of any shortcuts
- Now, we’ll work on hiding the taskbar
- Right click the taskbar and click the “Settings” option in the menu that pops up
- A new window will appear
- Find the option that says “Automatically hide the taskbar in desktop mode” and make sure that it is “on”
- Right click the taskbar and click the “Settings” option in the menu that pops up
Your final desktop screen should look like the large picture above. There should only be the default Rainmeter skins on the screen.
Step 4: Choose a Skin
Now, let’s add a custom skin to Rainmeter.
- Go to
- The Discover page lists a few websites that contain skins made by the community
- A variety of individual skins as well as skin packages will be available to download
- However, skin packages may be easier to work with since all of the skins are designed to work with each other
- Download a skin from one of the websites
- For this tutorial, I’ll be using the Kotoko Suite v4.3.1. The download button should be on the right side of the page
WARNING:
Be careful when downloading any Rainmeter skin. Although uncommon, some skins have been found to contain malware. Use an anti-virus program to check all files.
Step 5: Download and Set Up Skin
- Once the file is done downloading, press the file to launch the installer
- Every skin has a different installer but should follow the same general setup
- In our case, a particular window pops up for our skin package
- Press “Install” in the window to install the skin
- Once the skin package is finished installing, two things will pop up: a skin from the skin package and a window that allows us to edit the settings of various skins in the skin package
- Play around with these windows to change settings according to your needs
Every skin package is different. In our case we were given a setup skin and a settings window
Step 6: Clear Desktop for New Skin
Right now, we have a few default skins on our desktop. We want to get rid of these to make room for our new skin package.
- Right click the welcome skin that came with the default skin package and click “Unload skin”
- The skin will disappear from the screen
- Do the same for the three other default skins in the top right corner of the desktop
The desktop should now only have a skin from the downloaded skin package
Step 7: Customize Desktop With Skins
Now for the fun part.
- Right click the skin from the downloaded skin package
- In the menu that pops up, hover over the name of the skin package
- For us, it is “Kotoko 4.0”
- A secondary menu will appear with quite a few options
- These are the types of skins available in the package
- Hover over one of these options, another menu will pop up containing one or many “.ini” files
- These are the particular skins available for each option.
- Click on a particular option in this menu.
- The corresponding skin will appear on your desktop
- Go through each option and find which ones you like.
- If you don’t like a skin that you click on, you can always use the “Unload skin” option as described in a previous step to make it disappear from your screen.
- If you like a particular skin, drag it anywhere on your screen by clicking and dragging the skin to another location on your screen.
- Once you find a location that you like, right click the skin and go to the “Settings” option.
- Go to the “Draggable” option and click it.
- This will prevent the skin from moving, even if you click and drag it.
- If you want to move it again, go to the “Draggable” option and click it to allow you to move it to another location.
- Repeat the above steps until you have all the skins you are interested in on your screen and in the right places.
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I’ve never really been a desktop gadgets and widgets type of person, but I often put an inspirational quote on my desktop wallpaper. Today we’ll show you how to do this using Rainmeter, no matter what wallpaper you switch to.
The great thing about using Rainmeter is that you can switch your wallpaper, or rotate it, and the quote stays in the same place. What we’ll do is show how to create a very simple skin and customize it to fit our needs.
Creating a Simple Static Quote Rainmeter Skin
Rainmeter might seem to be confusing for many of you, but it’s actually a lot simpler to use than you think. You’ll want to start by heading into your Documents folder, where you’ll find the Rainmeter –> Skins folder.
Once you’re there, create a new folder to house all of your own custom skins.
Then create a new folder for the new quote config—I called mine StaticQuote—and then add a .INI file with the same name to the folder. In this case, that meant creating a new text file and renaming it to StaticQuote.ini, which you can actually do directly from Notepad in the next step.
Open up Notepad and paste in the following text, which is all you need for this very basic configuration. You can feel free to edit the quote I’ve included, which is something I found in this @codinghorror post.
[Quote]
Meter=STRING
MeterStyle=QuoteStyle
Text=”Go that way, Really fast. If something gets in your way… turn.”
Now head to File –> Save As, change the “Save as type” to All Files instead of the default, and then give it the filename ending in .ini as shown here:
It’s really important to make sure the file has the .ini extension.
Activating the New Config
The easiest way to deal with loading new configurations and reloading them quickly is to open up the RainBrowser application included in Rainmeter—then click the Browse tab on the left-hand pane. You should see your skins folder, with your configuration underneath it.
Down near the bottom of the window, you’ll see your skin, and you can simply click the Load Skin link and it will show up on the screen.
You should leave the RainBrowser window open, since we’ll be making more changes to the skin—you can just use the Refresh Skin link to quickly reload the skin every time you change the configuration file.
Changing the Font and Color
The new theme should look something like this with the default settings that we gave you, but you can easily customize and change the configuration to your liking. Let’s take a closer look at the style section of our configuration to understand how the different options work.
Changing the Color
The FontColor=FFFFFFFF line is what sets the color for the text, as you’d expect—but you’ll notice that instead of the standard HTML-style color code, it’s got 2 extra characters. This is because it’s actually RGB(A) with the (A) being the alpha channel—so the last two characters go from 00, or fully transparent, to FF, or zero transparency. You’d ideally pick somewhere in the middle.
For instance, to change the color to black, you’d change the line to the following—though you’ll note that the default color is black, so that would be pointless.
Changing the Font Face
If you don’t like the default font, you can use the FontFace variable, with the name of an installed font in Windows. For instance, to change the font to Calibri, you could use this:
Change the Font Style
If you want to use bold, italic, or even bold italics, you can use the StringStyle variable, which takes one of the following values: NORMAL, BOLD, ITALIC and BOLDITALIC. To change the font to bold, you’d do:
And of course, you’ll be able to change the font size by adjusting the FontSize variable, as you’d imagine.
Adding a Drop Shadow to the Text
The only problem with the white text against the lighter colored background is that it isn’t quite as noticeable as you’d like—and if you used dark text instead, you couldn’t switch to a darker wallpaper without causing visibility problems.
The solution is to use the StringEffect variable to set a shadow or a border on the text, making it much more visible against any background. For instance, to set a drop shadow on the text, you’d use the following—to set a border instead, you’d replace SHADOW with BORDER.
Here’s an example of what it looks like normally, then with a drop shadow, and then with a border instead:
If you wanted to use a darker text, you can use a light border or drop shadow by using the FontEffectColor variable. For instance, for a black text with a white border, you’d use:
There’s a lot more configuration settings that you can choose from, all of which can be found in the Rainmeter manual.
Congrats, you’ve created your first Rainmeter skin! Stay tuned, we’ll be covering how to do even more powerful skins in the future.
This is the fourth part in our series explaining how to use Rainmeter. If you haven’t already, make sure to read the previous three parts in the series:
Got any specific Rainmeter questions you’d like answered? Leave your question in the comments and we’ll see if we can help.
Today I will show you how you can use only 2 programs and make your desktop look much nicer! watch the video above for the tutorial & make your windows 10 desktop look better.
For this tutorial we will be using Rainmeter and Nexus Dock to give your desktop a new professional look. Follow these easy steps shown in the video to get this look on your laptop or desktop PC.
For More Skins and similar stuff, subscribe to my channel below & Stay Tuned 🙂
What is Rainmeter?
Rainmeter a simple application that’s been around for quite some time now. It was used to customize Windows XP back in the day. But we can also use it to customize Windows 10!
For more information on Rainmeter, Click Here.
Do You Really Need To Customize Your Desktop?
Well, you are probably bored seeing that same old desktop every time, unless you barely use it, in which case, you probably don’t need to customize it either. For me, I make content for my website (Yes, this one!) and also edit videos for my YouTube Channel called Viral Hattrix. So I use my computer for hours every day. And I was bored, the same old look and feel made me feel tired and lazy. That’s when I decided to give my Desktop a Fresh Look. And Believe me, that has helped increase my focus and improved my workflow. So I guess you should also try giving your Desktop a Different Look and see if It helps you too!
Will I Face Any Performance Issues?
The short answer is ‘No’. Rainmeter does not require much resources to work. But if you are looking for rather detailed and complete answer, let me explain it to you. Many people ask me if using applications like Rainmeter and Nexus Dock will result in any loss of performance. But I think what you need to know is that it needs only a little bit of your RAM and CPU power.If you have a computer with, say, 3 to 4GB of RAM, and 256MB of VRAM (Graphics Memory), you have nothing to worry about. I have personally tested the power usage of these applications on my Intel i7 9700K and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. I know what you’re thinking, we don’t have that! well maybe you do, but I assume you don’t, because you are reading this! Well you should know I’m not testing if my computer is slowing down while Rainmeter and Nexus Dock are running! Instead, I will test just how much Resource Usage is there by these applications. So I Found Out That Rainmeter was using ONLY about 1-2% CPU, and 8mb of RAM, while Nexus Dock was also using only 6mb of RAM. The CPU Usage was 0%!. I think it’s pretty clear now that these apps don’t have big impact on performance. However if you have a really old computer and think its causing any problem, you can close the apps from the Taskbar icon, and continue with your work to ensure the best performance!
So Without anymore talk, let’s have a look at today’s Rainmeter Customization Pack:
REQUIREMENTS
1. Rainmeter
2. 7-zip / WinRAR(or any other archive extraction program).
3. Font (Evogria): Download Evogria Font (Important!).
INSTRUCTIONS
Watch The Video For Full Instructions.
Enjoy The Free Theme & Don’t Forget To Like, Share & Subscribe 🙂
Rainmeter skin is a free and open-source desktop customization utility theme for Windows, released under the GNU GPL v2 license. It allows the user to create and display user-generated customizable desktop widgets or applets called “skins”.
How to Customize Windows Desktop with Rainmeter skins
That display information, which is Ready to use the collections of skins that can be downloaded and installed in packages known as “suites.” Common functionalities of Rainmeter skins include desktop clocks, RSS readers, system monitors, weather widgets, application launchers, and audio players.
Customized Windows Desktop
It has been around since Windows XP, where it was used as a tool for displaying basic info on the desktop, which later gained a large community of following that produced high-quality skins which can change the whole desktop user experience.
Development of Rainmeter Application:
The Rainmeter project was initially developed by Kimmo ‘Rainy’ Pekkola, the developer of Rainlendar(Software solutions) in 2001. It is working with all types of Windows operating systems like Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows XP also with 64bit & 32bit versions.
Installation:
Rainmeter can be installed portably as well, but it isn’t recommended. The “standard installation” works just fine. Installation is simple, but make sure “Launch Rainmeter on startup” is checked, or else it will have to be manually restarted after a reboot. If you want the latest updates, you can also build it from the source code at their Github repository
Installation is graphically shown, step by step below…
Step1: Double click on the downloaded application.
Step2: Select the standard installation & click on the next button.
step3: Tap on the install button.
Here is the Rain meter icon to customize your skins
Tweaking Tips:
Rainmeter allows for an amazing amount of personal customization. If you want to get your hands dirty with the code behind the skins, it isn’t too complex.
Right-click on a skin and hit “Edit skin”, which will bring up a configuration file with lots of variable definitions.
For example, if you want to change the color of the outer rim of the clock displayed on the desktop, you can edit the values of the variables that control that. Majority of the skins have comments in the configuration file, so it’s easy to find out which element is being controlled by which element.
Usage:
These are written in a code using a text editor and stored in a form of INI configuration files. System resource values and other information(weather, time…) is stored through “meter” values within a skin, which can then be then customized after.
Credits:
CNET credited Rainmeter with 4 out of 5-star rating. As it praised the software’s flexibility and the wide variety of themes and “enthusiastic community” while noting the program “isn’t as intuitive as it could be.””
Softpedia credited Rainmeter with 4 out of 5-star rating, highlighting its comprehensive tutorials and low system resource usage…
Alternatives to Rainmeter:
If you’re working on a Mac or Linux OS, unfortunately, you couldn’t access it, as there isn’t a Rainmeter build for OS X or Linux. For Mac users, there is Geektool, which performs many of the same basic functions which is being done by Rainmeter such as displaying info like time and weather on the desktop and some basic widgets.
