Windows
Customise your desktop with Rainmeter
The default Windows desktop customisation experience is fine, but not much more. You can change your wallpaper, adjust window accent colours, and switch up your lock screen – and that’s about it. If you want more power to change up your computer’s style, you will likely be disappointed with the results.
That all changes with Rainmeter. This lets you install various “skins” on Windows, all of which can add new flavours of visual flair to your desktop. These range from small widgets showing the time and weather to full-blown overhaul suites with moveable items, redesigned taskbars, and custom shortcut icons.
You can even build your own skins if you have a bit of coding knowledge. We will not cover that in detail today, but it is an area to explore further if it feels like your sort of thing. The good news for everyone else, though, is that Rainmeter requires no coding knowledge whatsoever, and you can easily customise most skins to your heart’s content with a few simple clicks.
Getting started
Head to www.rainmeter.net and download the program’s installer, then follow the on-screen instructions to set it up on your computer. You can either choose the final release or the latest beta – betas are stable and have the latest bug fixes, but they may occasionally have features removed before they become finalized.
Once it’s installed, Rainmeter will show a few basic widgets (known as “skins”) on your desktop – the time and date, your PC’s component statuses, and more. It will also present you with a welcome splash screen. These are all part of a pre-installed suite called Illustro. In the Windows Notification Area, right-click the Rainmeter icon, then click “Skins > illustro > Google > Google.ini.” This will place a Google search box on your desktop, which you can move around wherever you like. To remove it, right-click the widget, then click “Unload skin.” This principle applies to all skins.
You can move each skin to wherever you want, and it will remain there when you next restart your computer. To move more than one skin at once, hold Ctrl and Alt, then click on the elements you want to move; they will turn a different
color to show they are selected. Now just drag one, and the others will move with it. Click anywhere on the screen to deselect them.
Finding more advanced skins
The Illustro skin does a decent job as a basic skin explainer, but it would be a shame to stop there. Rainmeter also has an enormous range of user-created skins available, many of which are truly breath-taking. In this example, we will make use of the Sonder skin.
Head to the official Rainmeter DeviantArt page at www. deviantart.com/rainmeter/ gallery. DeviantArt is one of the largest artistic communities on the internet and houses a curated selection of excellent Rainmeter skins. At the link above, click “Skins,” then navigate to the entry titled “Sonder – Rainmeter skin” [Image A]. Under the main image, click the download button (you’ll need a free DeviantArt account), and save the skin.
Double-click on the RMSKIN file to launch the installer, then follow the on-screen instructions. When it finishes, you will see a settings box, as well as elements such as a large time display, your system details (such as CPU usage), a Performance Monitor icon, and more.
Make it yours
Let’s start customising our widgets. Move each element to where you want it on the screen. Rainmeter remembers their positions so you will not have to keep moving them. Next, rightclick the weather forecast and click “Variants.” Here you will see several different options; click “WeatherExtd2.ini” and the weather widget changes to a more horizontal layout. Try this with
each of the other widgets.
Next, go to the settings box (if you have closed it, hover over the time and date skin, then click the cog icon). On the “Main Settings” tab under the “Time” heading, choose a new color for the clock’s minute display. By default it is dark green, but this might not match your wallpaper.
We have chosen a dark blue to go with our Windows background picture [Image B]. You can change everything, from the size of each widget to the colours it uses and the date formats displayed.
Now click the “Weather” tab. It is no use getting weather for Houston when you are in New York City, for instance, so you will want to make sure your weather is relevant to your location. Rainmeter uses https://weather. com to get its forecasts; head there and search for your city, copy the long code at the end of its web address, then paste it into the box on the “Weather Settings” tab and press Return [Image C].
The “System Advanced” tab lets you customise the info you see on your hardware components. You will get the most benefit from this if you use the “System-Advanced. ini” variant, which displays more detailed information. Part of its functionality relies on the HWInfo app, although Sonder still works without it – you will just get more specific data with this installed.
Managing a Rainmeter skin
An important aspect of Rainmeter is its “Manage” screen. This enables you to control each skin and widget in depth. To access it, right-click the Rainmeter icon in the Windows 10 Notification Area and click “Manage,” or left-click the icon once.
Click the “Active skins” drop-down box, then click “Sonder\SonderWeather\ WeatherExtd2.ini.”
This will load the settings for the weather widget [Image D].
If you want to prevent the skin from being accidentally moved, untick the “Draggable” checkbox. “Click through” enables you to click any element sitting underneath the widget, such as a file on your desktop. To aid with positioning, make sure “Keep on screen,” “Snap to edges,” and “Save position” are all checked. Alternatively, deselect the first two to move your skins exactly where you want them, without having them snap to the edges of your screen or each other.
To the left of these options are a few more visual and positioning options. You can use the “Coordinates” boxes to get some fine-grained control over where your widgets sit on your screen. The “Position” drop-down box determines whether the skin sits on top of other windows at all times, while you can also decide how transparent it is and whether it fades in or out when you hover your mouse over it.
Once you have finished with these controls and options, you should have a perfectly customised Windows 10 desktop that is tailored to your needs. The Rainmeter developers encourage users to experiment with skins and adjust them as needed, so you could always tinker with them even more if you so desire (see the boxout “Making a Skin” for more information).