HOW TO GET THE LOOK

We’re once again using the Rainmeter customisation tool to give our Windows desktop a minimalist overhaul ( see the gaming section on p27 for advice on installing Rainmeter).

The goal here is to create a desktop that’s light on distractions, isn’t strewn with icons and documents you’ll never find again, and gives you quick access to the stuff that’s important.

This time, we’re going to load in the FLHUD skin for Rainmeter, which you’ll find at pcpro.link/315FLHUD. The skin consists of several different elements (which are, confusingly, also called skins) that – once you’ve installed FLHUD – you’ll need to enable separately.

Once it’s been installed, open Rainmeter and click on the FLHUD folder in the Skins tab, select the Settings folder and then double-click settings.ini. Here you’ll be presented with a settings menu that allows you to enable the different skin elements, as well as tweak all manner of other settings.

In the Settings menu, you’ll see options to activate the Time-Date, the Launcher, the Player and the Visualiser. The Time-Date puts a large, elegant clock with today’s date on the desktop; the Launcher is a strip of web shortcuts that will instantly open the chosen website in your default browser; the Player is a desktop controller for your favourite music service (after all, everyone needs a bit of background music from time to time); and the Visualiser is a modest graphic equalizer that gives the desktop a bit of visual interest. You can, of course, activate or leave alone as many of these elements as you like, and if you click and drag on them, you can move them to wherever you want them to sit.

A word on the Launcher. It comes with a default set of shortcuts, but you’ll naturally want to choose your own. To do that, open the FLHUD folder in Rainmeter’s Skins tab again, expand the Launcher folder, right-click on

launcher.ini and select Edit. You’ll be presented with a config file; scroll down to find the listings for the web shortcuts. Enter the name of the website as you want it to appear in Launcher in the Text= variable and the URL (not forgetting https://) in the

LeftMouseDownAction= field. Now save the document in Notepad (or whatever text editor the file opened in) and then click “Refresh all” at the bottom of the Rainmeter window to apply the changes.

As you’ll see from our screenshot, the Launcher doesn’t automatically space the gap between the words in the Launcher, which will trigger some people’s OCD. To adjust the space, go back into the config doc and patiently fiddle with the X= and StringAlign= variables until you get it looking right.

For the desktop background, we have simply used one of the dark backgrounds that comes with Windows 10. We’ve also hidden desktop icons to reduce onscreen clutter ( again, see the gaming section for instructions on how to do this).