A Windows launcher with system-tray and taskbar icon support, settings-sync capability, built with WinUI 3, Windows App SDK, WebView2, and SSH.NET.
Little Launcher lives in the Windows system tray and/or taskbar. Clicking its icon opens a flyout — either a grid of app and website shortcuts, or a web page in its own right. It also synchronises your settings — through OneDrive, Google Drive, WebDAV, a network file share, another folder, or your own SSH/SFTP server — so you can keep your launcher configuration in sync across machines.
Key features:
- Multiple launchers — define multiple named launchers, each with its own icon and items.
- Web launchers — point a launcher at a web page instead of a list of shortcuts, and its tray icon opens that page itself: a Home Assistant dashboard, webmail, Teams, WhatsApp, a status board, one click away. Each keeps its own sign-in between restarts, so two launchers can be signed in to the same site as different people — or share one profile if you would rather sign in once.
- A bar of pages — a web launcher holds a list of bookmarks, the first of which is the page it opens. Add a second and they appear as a browser-style bar along the bottom. Clicking one opens it just as a browser's bookmarks bar would; middle-click or Shift-click opens it in a new tab.
- Bookmark the page you are looking at — with the address bar showing, a star at the end of it adds the current page to the launcher's bookmark bar, or takes it back out; the … menu carries the same action when the address bar is off. Right-click a bookmark in the bar to open it in a new tab, rename it, change its address, copy it, make it the one that opens by default, or remove it — and drag bookmarks along the bar to reorder them.
- Costs nothing while you are not looking at it — a dismissed web launcher stops rendering, is suspended, and is then unloaded entirely, so a hidden dashboard uses no CPU, network or memory. Launchers you want to keep receiving are the exception, and they say so.
- Real Windows notifications, with buttons and replies — a web launcher's notifications arrive as ordinary Windows notifications rather than being lost inside a page nobody is looking at. Action buttons work, and a site that offers a reply box gives you one in the notification itself — typing a reply there does exactly what typing it in the app does. Clicking a notification opens the launcher it came from — and a notification goes away once you have dealt with it, whether you clicked it, opened the launcher some other way, or read the message on your phone. One busy launcher cannot bury every other launcher's notifications under a pile nobody ever cleared.
- Set up once, not every morning — launchers set to keep running are opened quietly in the background when Little Launcher starts, so their notifications work from the moment you sign in, without you clicking each tray icon to wake it up.
- Site permissions asked in the flyout — a page that wants your camera, microphone or location asks in a bar inside the flyout rather than a browser-sized prompt, and the answer is remembered for that launcher alone. A launcher you trust can skip the asking entirely.
- Sized and placed how you want it — drag the edges to resize, pin it open, anchor it to a corner or edge instead of the tray, set a zoom level, or lock a size in so a stray drag cannot change it. The header's maximize fills the screen for as long as the flyout is open, then goes back to its usual size next time.
- Or an ordinary window, if you would rather — turn on Regular Window and a web launcher stops behaving like a flyout: it gets a taskbar button that lights up while it is open, an Alt-Tab entry, and it stays put when you click elsewhere. Clicking its taskbar button minimises or closes it, whichever you prefer, and it can still be told to get out of the way on focus loss if you want both.
- Open them from Start, or Command Palette — every web launcher gets a Start Menu entry, so you can reach it the same way you reach any other app: Start search, PowerToys Command Palette, or anything else that reads the Start Menu. They keep themselves in step as you add, rename and remove launchers.
- Links open in tabs — a link that wants a new window opens as another tab of the launcher rather than throwing you out into your browser, and a tab strip appears as soon as there is more than one. Sign-in popups work properly inside the flyout, tabs remember where you were across a dismissal, and if you would rather links just went to your browser, one menu item puts that back.
- An address bar when you want one — a web launcher can show the page address under its header, and type a new one. Off by default, because most launchers open one known page.
- Options where you are looking — the flyout header's … menu carries the settings you actually change while using a launcher — window mode, address bar, tab bar, reload on open, where links open, where the flyout opens, whether moving and resizing it sticks — without going to the settings window for them.
- Application & website shortcuts — launch any executable or URL with one click from the flyout.
- Manual icon picker — choose item icons from Fluent glyphs, emojis, bundled app icons, uploaded images, or the selfh.st icon catalog.
- View modes — choose between list view, icon grid view, or a compact tray-sized small-icon grid with no labels.
- Groups & columns — organise items into groups and multi-column layouts.
- Direct flyout reordering — drag items in the live flyout to reorder them, with the same insertion-indicator style used in the editor.
- Drag in from anywhere — while editing a launcher, drag files, folders, shortcuts or browser links straight from File Explorer or the desktop into the flyout to add them, complete with names and icons. (Windows' own Start Menu can't act as a drag source, but its shortcuts can be dragged from
Start Menu\Programsin Explorer.) - Direct flyout item actions — right-click items in the live flyout to move, edit, or remove them without opening the settings editor.
- System-tray icons — a tray icon that opens a flyout popup for shortcuts.
- Taskbar icons — a companion helper exe (
LauncherShortcut) can be pinned to the taskbar so one click opens the flyout without needing to find the tray icon. - Settings sync — keep all your launchers in sync across machines through OneDrive, Google Drive, WebDAV (Nextcloud, ownCloud, a NAS), a network file share, any other folder, or your own SSH/SFTP server. OneDrive and Google Drive sign in through your browser and use their own APIs, so no sync client has to be installed and an upload is confirmed by the service rather than handed to a background app. Each is granted only a private folder of its own — nothing else in your drive is visible to Little Launcher.
- Shared launchers — share a single launcher with someone else: create a OneDrive link to send them, publish it to a WebDAV server, put it on SFTP, or drop it in a shared folder. The owner chooses whether subscribers can edit it or only receive it, and that choice travels with the share rather than being something the subscriber has to guess.
- Export & import — back up and restore items locally via JSON.
- Bookmark import — import bookmarks directly from Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or any browser's exported HTML bookmarks file into a launcher.
- Pick a web address from your bookmarks — a web launcher's address, and the bookmarks in its bar, can be chosen from a searchable list of what you have already bookmarked in Chrome, Edge or Firefox, rather than typed from memory.
- Update paths per install type — Microsoft Store installs check for and apply updates through the Store from inside the app; the portable build checks GitHub Releases and takes you to the new release to download it.
Microsoft Store (recommended): Get Little Launcher from the Microsoft Store — installs and updates automatically through the Store.
Portable: Grab the portable ZIP for your architecture (x64 or ARM64) from the Releases page and unzip it wherever you like — nothing is installed and no admin rights are needed. It tells you when a new version is out and links you to it; you replace the folder yourself. To remove it, run cleanup-uninstall.ps1 from the folder with the app closed (it clears settings, the startup entry and any shortcuts), then delete the folder.
Little Launcher used to ship an MSI installer as well. It has been retired in favour of these two: the Store handles installing, updating and uninstalling properly, and the portable build is for anyone who would rather not use the Store. Older releases keep their .msi files, and an existing MSI install keeps working — it will simply point you here when a new version appears.
Requirements: Windows 10 or 11 (build 22000 or later).
Little Launcher is a .NET 10 WinUI 3 app. See DEVELOPMENT.md for build prerequisites, the architecture overview, and the project layout.
Licensed under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0: free for any personal and other noncommercial use, including modifying and redistributing it. Commercial use is not permitted. Copyright © 2024-2026 Ryan Ewen.