Monio is a small black island that lives at the top of your Windows screen.
Most of the time it shows the clock. When a deadline is close, a song is playing or a file needs somewhere to go, it changes shape. Click it and your day opens underneath.
The one above is real enough to try. Rest the pointer on it for a moment, then click. Hold it down to squish it. Tick a task off.
- For
- Windows 11
- Price
- Free
- Status
- Private testing, public beta soon
Deadlines
Win+Alt+N
Type it the way you'd say it. The words can come in any order, and whatever's left over becomes the title.
Try , , , , or switch on Repeat. The term here is made up: this is week 7 of 11. You can also open it from the island at the top, where it splits off the side.
- Reads
- Course codes, week 8 or wk8, days, times, today, tomorrow, dates like 20 nov
- Reminds
- The day before at 9am, that morning at 9am, an hour before, and at 11:59pm
- An alert
- Waits beside the pill until you click it. Two soft glows run along the screen's edges.
- Snooze
- 1, 3 or 5 hours
- Calendars
- Any iCal or webcal link, refreshed every few hours
- Student mode
- Knows the week of term, breaks and flexi week included
Search
Win+Alt+S
A bar in the middle of the screen for sums, apps and files. If you type a sum, the answer is all you see.
Or try , , . These apps and files are examples.
- Sums
- + − × ÷ ^, % as a share, pi, thousands separators. Twelve significant digits, so 0.1 + 0.2 is 0.3.
- Apps
- Start menu and Store apps. Anything you opened in the last 30 days comes first.
- Files
- From Everything 1.4 or 1.5, otherwise the Windows index
- Its own index
- None. It only remembers when you last opened each app.
Clipboard history
Win+V
Replaces Windows' own history and opens at your text cursor, newest first, so Win+V then Enter always pastes the last thing you copied.
Example items. Tab in the search box changes the filter, and Ctrl+P favourites one.
- Keeps
- A week of copies, about 1,000 items up to 256 MB. Favourites stay until you remove them.
- Stores
- Text, rich text, HTML, images, and files as paths
- On disk
- Encrypted with Windows DPAPI. Deleted items are overwritten.
- Never keeps
- Copies a password manager marks as private
- Keys
- Enter pastes, Shift+Enter as plain text, Ctrl+1 to 9 by position, Ctrl+P favourite, Ctrl+D remove, Ctrl+Z undo
Controls and shelf
Scroll the opened island sideways for the taskbar's small jobs. Drag files onto it to keep them handy.
Drop a file here. It stays in your browser.
- Sound
- Drag or scroll. Scrolling over the resting pill works too.
- Brightness
- Reaches external monitors over DDC/CI
- Below
- Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, audio output, then every app's tray icon
- Calendar
- Click the date and a month splits off the island's left side
- Shelf
- Holds pointers to files, never copies, and starts empty each time
Pet
A blob in the island's corner that grows while you use Monio. It never gets sad and never asks for anything.
Dewbit
- Earns a point
- Finishing a deadline, pasting from history, parking a file, launching from search. Three a day at most.
- Grows
- At 0, 3, 9, 20 and 36 points, about a term of steady use
- Shapes
- Drop, Bean, Bun and Puff, five forms each
- Shiny
- 1 in 10 eggs
- Here
- Click to poke it, drag to stretch it. It's drawn by a port of the app's own shader.
What it does when
| You click the pill | Your text cursor stays where it was. Nothing in Monio takes focus unless you opened something you type into, and it hands focus back when that closes. |
|---|---|
| You're aiming at a browser tab | Clicks pass straight through. The pill only takes them once the pointer has rested on it for 120 ms. |
| You leave it alone | After 5 seconds it tucks up into a small notch on the screen's edge. |
| A video is fullscreen | It hides. A deadline can still bring it back with two soft glows. |
| A game is running | Nothing shows, glows or pings, on any monitor. Alerts wait and arrive together when you quit. |
| Your PC was asleep | Missed alerts arrive as one batch when you're back, marked as missed. |
| You want to change it | Settings open inside the island, and also live in monio.toml, so a setup can be shared like dotfiles. |
Its limits, honestly
- Clipboard encryption protects against a stolen drive or a copied file, not against malware already running on your account.
- Windows' own clipboard history is left alone, and may keep its own copy of what you copy.
- While an administrator window is in front, Windows hides keys from normal apps, so Win+V opens Windows' own history there.
- Screen readers can't read Monio's panels yet, and acknowledging an alert takes a click.
- Only English is understood when typing deadlines.
- Windows 10 hasn't been tried.
- Monio is closed source. The licences of everything it uses are in its About tab.
Monio 0.1
In private testing. The public beta will be free, for Windows 11, and install for your account only, with no admin prompt.
Download coming soon