Manual

Panels 4.0 for Windows

Every setting in this manual is shown with the name it has in Panels' own configuration files — the grey Name beside each one. You never need those names to use Panels, but if you open a .panel, .ltheme or Panels.config file, they are what you will see there.

Getting started

Panels puts bars and widget windows on your desktop, each built from tiles. A fresh install starts with one panel — a taskbar replacement along the bottom of your main display.

Right-click any panel to open its menu. The row of buttons across the top is the quick access row — Settings, Lock, Desktop and Wallpaper — and everything below it either changes the panel directly or opens the page that does.

Lock and unlock

Unlock: Unlocking a panel lets you move it, and puts its tiles into edit mode. A widget panel can also be resized while unlocked, and appears in Alt-Tab.
Lock: A locked panel can still be moved by holding Ctrl while you drag it, and a single tile can be put into edit mode by long-pressing it. Long-press again when done.

The lock is remembered separately for a bar and for a widget. A bar arrives locked, because it is furniture on an edge; a widget panel arrives unlocked, because the first thing anyone does with one is drag it somewhere. Locking a widget does not lock the bar it goes back to, or the other way round.

Rest the pointer on a tile — not merely cross it — and a small row of buttons appears beside it. Crossing a bar on the way somewhere else is fast and resting on it is not, which is what the short pause is for.

The settings button opens that tile's quick settings, with a page for how the tile is sized and placed and a page for the tile's own options — and a way through to the rest of its settings.
The detach button lifts the tile into a window of its own, and puts it back again. See Tiles in windows of their own.
After a divider, the detach all button does the same for every tile on the panel at once. The line is there because that is a different kind of thing to be pressing — everything to its left acts on one tile.

Which of these a locked panel still offers is your choice, per panel — see Locked Tile Controls.

Two shortcuts reach the same things without the pause: Alt+click a tile for its settings, and Alt+double-click it to lift it into a window of its own, or to put it back.

How Panels fits together

Panels, tiles and groups

There are three things to know, and everything else follows from them.

A panel: A bar on a screen edge, or a free window of its own — a widget. You can have as many as you like, on as many displays as you like. A panel decides where — its edge, its display, its size, whether it reserves space — and which theme it wears.
A tile: One thing on a panel: a clock, a weather readout, a graph, a row of shortcuts. Tiles are independent — each has its own size and its own settings, and most can be added more than once, so two clocks can show two time zones on the same bar.
A group: Every panel has three: Start, Center and End. On a horizontal panel that means left, middle and right; on a vertical one, top, middle and bottom. A tile belongs to exactly one group, and the group is what keeps a clock pinned to the far end while the tiles beside it come and go.

Appearance is separate from all three. Colours, opacity, blur, corners and fonts live in a theme, and a panel points at one — so two panels on the same desktop can look nothing alike, and changing a theme changes every panel using it at once.

Where settings are kept

Panels keeps its settings under %APPDATA%\Lucinite\, split by what the setting is about rather than by what page it appears on. All three kinds reload immediately when they change on disk.

Panels\Panels\<name>.panel: One file per panel, holding its design: its tiles, their order and sizes, its edge and thickness, and which theme it uses. These files are portable — send one to somebody and they can double-click it to install the same panel. A tile that has been floated into its own window keeps that window's settings here too, with the tile, under DetachedPanel — which is why they travel with it if you move the tile to another panel.
Panels\Panels.config: Everything that is about this computer rather than about the panel: which display each panel is on, where on it, how it is scaled, whether it is switched on, whether it is locked. Deliberately kept out of the .panel file so that none of it travels with a shared panel.
Themes\<name>.ltheme: One file per theme — every colour, opacity, blur and corner setting. Extracted on first run, and shareable in the same way.

Panels

Settings ▸ Panel ▸ General is where a panel is configured. The panel list in the left-hand nav shows every panel you have; Add Panel sits above it.

Add: Click Add Panel, give the panel a name, and confirm.
Duplicate: Duplicate Panel, at the foot of the General page, copies the panel and everything on it — useful for putting a matching bar on a second display.
Delete: Delete Panel, at the foot of the same page.
On / off: The glyph button beside a panel in the nav switches it off without deleting it. Its file and all its settings stay put. Enabled

Where a panel sits

Two settings decide this, and they are independent: Edge says where the panel is, and Docked says whether it takes that space away from everything else.

Edge: Top, Bottom, Left or Right for a bar on that edge — or Widget, which is the panel on no edge at all: a free, movable, resizable window. Unlock it to move or resize it; lock it and a stray drag cannot shift it.
Docked: On, the panel reserves its strip of screen edge exactly like the Windows taskbar — other windows keep clear of it and a maximised window stops short of it. Off, it sits on the edge reserving nothing, so windows can extend underneath: a panel present without giving up any screen space to it. A panel set to hide (Auto Hide Smart or Always) reserves nothing either way, since it is not always there.
Meaningless for a Widget, which has no edge to reserve, so the toggle has no effect until the panel goes back to one.

A panel sent to Widget remembers the edge it came from and returns there. Its Docked setting survives the trip untouched, so a bar that was reserving nothing does not quietly come back as a space-reserving one. Its layer and its lock are kept separately for bar and widget.

A panel holding a single tile can be sent to Widget from the tile itself — see Tiles in windows of their own.

Panel settings

These are the panel's own design, and they travel with the .panel file.

Name: What the panel is called, in the nav and in its file name. Can be changed at any time.
Theme Theme: Which theme this panel wears. Themes themselves are created and edited under Appearance; this is a picker only.
Visualizer Visualizer\Selected: An audio visualizer running behind the whole panel. Choose one of the installed visualizers, or none. Default: none.
Layer Visualizer\Layer: Where the visualizer sits within the panel. Bottom puts it behind the panel's own background, so it shows through only if that background is not fully opaque; Top puts it in front of everything, tiles included. Default: Bottom.
Scale Scale: Scales the panel and everything on it, from 50% to 175%. Default: 100%.
Z-Order ZOrder: Which band the panel sits in among other windows. Bottom keeps it behind ordinary windows; Normal makes it an ordinary window; Top keeps it above ordinary windows but yields to a genuine full-screen application, so it does not sit over a game or a film; Full screen stays above those too. Default: Top for a bar, Normal for a widget — the two are remembered separately.
Edge Edge: Where the panel sits: Widget for a free window on no edge, or Top, Bottom, Left or Right for a bar on that edge. See above. Default: Bottom for the taskbar panel Panels ships with, Right for anything you add.
Docked Docked: Whether the bar reserves its strip of screen edge. Has no effect on a Widget. Default: on.
Thickness Thickness: The width of a vertical panel, or the height of a horizontal one: Small, Medium, Large or Extra large. Bars only. Default: Large.
Size to Content SizeToContent: The panel shrinks to fit its tiles rather than running the length of the edge. Default: off.
Auto Hide AutoHide, SmartAutoHide: Three choices, as a bar.
Off: the panel stays out, and reserves its strip of the screen when it is docked.
Smart: the panel stays out until it is in the way. It reserves nothing, so windows may lie under it, and it steps aside the moment you turn to one it covers — a click on that window, or a window you drag or resize into its strip. It keeps away while that window, or any other, is under it, and comes back when its strip is clear again or when the pointer reaches the edge. A click on the panel's own windows never moves it.
Always: the panel hides off screen whenever the pointer leaves it, and comes back when the pointer reaches the edge — auto-hide as it always was.
Kept as two flags in Panels.config: AutoHide is Always, SmartAutoHide is Smart, never both on, so a panel that auto-hid before still does. Default: off.
Locked Tile Controls LockedTileControls: How much of the tile hover row a locked panel still offers. Locking says you have finished arranging the panel, but how far that goes is a matter of taste — a panel locked so nothing gets dragged by accident is not the same as one locked because it is finished.
None offers nothing on hover, and the panel is only what it shows. Widgets Only keeps the two buttons that float tiles out and bring them back, and drops the settings button — the one that edits the panel. Show All behaves as though the panel were unlocked. Default: Widgets Only, which is what a locked panel has always done.
Display: The monitor the panel lives on, picked from the display map. Changing it moves the panel. Display
Virtual Desktop VirtualDesktop: Which virtual desktop the panel belongs to, chosen from a row of tiles — one per desktop, each showing that desktop's own wallpaper, preceded by an All tile. Pick a desktop and the panel appears only there; pick All and it follows every desktop. Default: All.

Settings that stay on this PC

These describe how a panel sits on your machine, so they are kept in Panels.config and never travel with a shared .panel file. Most are set by using the panel rather than by editing them.

Enabled Enabled: Whether the panel is switched on. Set by the on/off button in the nav.
Locked Locked: Whether the panel is locked. Two values: one for a bar, one for a widget. Default: locked as a bar, unlocked as a widget.
Last edge LastEdge: The edge a panel returns to when it stops being a widget — and the edge it still belongs to while floating, which is what the tile's dock button points at. Never holds Widget itself; recorded automatically, on the way onto an edge as well as off it, so a panel that starts life as a widget still has an edge waiting for it.
Coordinates Coordinates, Widget\Coordinates: Where the panel is and how big it is. Recorded as you move and resize it, and kept separately for a bar and for a widget.
Display device DisplayDevice: The Windows device name of the panel's display — the stable identity behind the display number, so a panel finds its way home after a monitor is unplugged and plugged back in.
Edge order EdgeOrder: Where this panel sits among the others claiming the same screen edge.
Scale Scale: Kept per machine as well, because the right scale depends on the display it lands on.

Right-clicking a panel reaches most of the above without opening Settings, plus a few things that live only here.

Settings, Lock, Desktop, Wallpaper: The quick access row across the top. Desktop shows and hides the desktop; Wallpaper opens the wallpaper picker. Right-clicking a tile and choosing Settings opens that tile's page rather than the panel's.
Panels: Every panel you have, grouped by display, each switchable on or off from here.
Edge, Thickness, Z-Order, Display: The same settings as the General page, as one-click rows.
Auto Hide: Off, Smart or Always, as one-click choices — the same three as the General page's setting.
Docked, Size to Content, Hide Desktop Icons: Toggles, matching the settings of the same names.
Task Manager: Opens Windows' Task Manager.
Exit: Closes Panels, at the far end of the menu.

Tiles

Adding and arranging

Settings ▸ Panel ▸ Tiles lists everything on the panel, under the three groups — Start, Center and End — with everything available but unused under Inactive.

Add: Click the green + beside a tile in the Inactive list, or double-click its name. It joins the Start group, and you drag it from there to wherever you want it. A tile that can be used more than once stays in the Inactive list after you take one, so you can add several — two clocks for two time zones, a weather tile per city.
Move: Drag a tile by the grip handle at the right of its row to reorder it within its group, or to move it into another group entirely.
Remove: Click the − beside the tile, or double-click its name, to send it back to Inactive. Remove Tile at the foot of the tile's own settings page does the same.

Settings every tile has

Open a tile from the nav, or click the gear on the tile itself. Every tile's page opens with these, followed by whatever that particular tile adds.

Width, Height: Set independently, from Auto through Small, Medium, Large and Extra large. Auto means the tile measures itself — on a bar it fills the panel up to its largest useful size. Only the sizes a given tile actually supports are offered, and a tile whose width and height are always equal gets one control instead of two.
Alignment: Which group the tile is in — Start, Center or End. The same thing as dragging it between groups, from the other direction.
Visualizer Visualizer\Selected: An audio visualizer inside this one tile, chosen the same way as the panel's. Default: none.
Layer Visualizer\Layer: Where it sits within the tile. Bottom is behind the tile's own background; Middle is above the background but below the tile's content, so it shows in whatever gaps the content leaves; Top is in front of everything, border included. Default: Bottom.

Tiles in windows of their own

Any tile can be lifted off its panel into a small window of its own, and put back. Rest the pointer on the tile and press the detach button in the row that appears.

A detached tile keeps the theme of the panel it came from, and follows it live — retheme the panel and the floating tile changes with it. The panel's own layout is untouched: the tile still belongs to the panel, and the space it occupied simply closes up until it comes back.

Detach as a widget: Lifts this one tile out, leaving the rest of the panel where it is.
Return to panel: What the same button says once the tile is floating. It goes back where it came from, at the size it had there — resizing the floating window does not rewrite the size the tile uses on the panel.
Detach every tile as a widget: The button after the divider. Sends every tile on the panel out at once, each into a window of its own.
Return every tile to the panel: What that button says once anything is out. It is offered whenever at least one tile is floating, because collecting them is the more urgent of the two — a tile in a window somewhere is harder to find than a tile on a bar.

A panel holding one tile

When a tile is the only thing on its panel, the detach button changes what it does: it turns the whole panel into a widget, and says Dock this panel to bring it back. Detaching the tile would leave an empty panel behind and put two windows where one was asked for, so the panel becomes the widget instead — because at that point the panel is the tile.

Making a panel that holds several tiles into a widget is a different thing, and lives where panel-wide changes belong: the Edge setting, in the panel's right-click menu and in Settings.

Send every tile out and the panel gets out of the way — the bar hides itself and gives back the screen edge it was reserving, rather than sitting there empty. It comes straight back the moment a tile returns. A panel with no tiles at all is left alone, since hiding that would leave you no way to reach it.

Floating tiles are remembered. Close Panels with tiles out and they come back out, in the same places. Each tile remembers its own floating size and position, kept with the tile rather than with the panel — so a tile moved to another panel takes them along.

Appearance & themes

Everything under Settings ▸ Appearance edits a theme, not a panel. A panel chooses its theme with the Theme setting on its General page, so editing a theme changes every panel using it. Create one with + beside the theme name — the current settings are copied into it — and remove one with the bin. Panels ships with five to start from: Clear, Color, Glass, Neon and Plain.

Colours are set in two parts throughout: a colour, and a brightness from 0 to 100% applied to it. Backgrounds add an opacity. Two of the colour choices are not fixed colours at all but follow Windows — the OS accent colour and the OS window colour — so a theme can track your Windows colours instead of pinning its own.

General

The theme itself, and how Panels' own windows look.

Theme Theme: Which theme is being edited, plus the buttons to create and delete themes.
Mode ThemeMode: System, Dark or Light. System follows the Windows app mode and changes with it.
Font FontFamily: The font used throughout Panels.
Foreground ForegroundColor, ForegroundBrightness: Text and icon colour.
Accent AccentColor, AccentBrightness: The highlight colour — selected items, hover states, the mark on each icon. Can follow the Windows accent colour.
Background WindowColor, WindowOpacity, WindowBrightness: The background of Panels' own windows — Settings, tile flyouts, the wallpaper picker.
Acrylic WindowAcrylic: Blurs whatever is behind those windows.
Rounded Corners WindowRoundedCorners: Rounds their corners.
Shadow WindowShadow: Draws a drop shadow behind them.
Animation WindowAnimation: Animates them as they open and close.

Panel

How a panel wearing this theme looks.

Customize Colors PanelCustomColor: Off, the panel uses the theme's own window colours. On, the two settings below take over — which is what lets one theme give its panels a different colour from its windows.
Background PanelColor, PanelOpacity, PanelBrightness: The panel's background colour, how see-through it is, and how bright.
Foreground PanelForegroundColor, PanelForegroundBrightness: Text and icon colour on the panel.
Rounded Corners PanelRoundedCorners: Rounds the panel's corners.
Animation PanelAnimation: Animates the panel as it shows and hides — auto-hide, in particular.
Shadow PanelShadow: Draws a drop shadow behind the panel.
Acrylic PanelAcrylic: Blurs the desktop behind the panel. Most visible with a background opacity well below 100%.
Face PanelFace: How the panel's surface and edge are drawn, over and above its colour. Standard is the plain surface; Glass a frosted body with a lit rim; Prism a sheen that shifts with the light; Frost heavy frost with ice crystals in it and a cold rim; Neon a glowing tube in the accent colour around the edge; Carbon a dark carbon weave with a sheen across it and a thin light edge. Default: Standard.
Adaptive Color AdaptiveColor, PanelAdaptiveColor: Shifts the colours you picked lighter or darker to suit light or dark mode, so one theme reads well in both. Off, they are used exactly as picked. One setting for the theme's windows and one for its panels, which applies while Customize Colors is on. Default: on.

Tile

How the tiles on that panel look. Set once, for every tile on the panel.

Margin TileMarginThickness: The space around every tile, which is what sets how far apart they sit.
Background TileColor, TileOpacity, TileBrightness: The tile background. Set the opacity to nothing and the tiles disappear into the panel, leaving only their content — the usual way to get a bar that reads as one surface rather than a row of cards.
Border TileBorderColor, TileBorderBrightness: The colour of the tile border.
Thickness TileBorderThickness: How thick that border is. Zero for none.
Rounded Corners TileRoundedCorners: Rounds the tile corners.
Animation TileAnimation: Animates tiles as they are added, removed and resized.
Face TileFace: How tiles draw their text and icons. Standard is the ordinary look; Glass a frosted body with a lit rim and a shadow; Metal brushed metal; Prism a shifting sheen; Neon a tube lit in the accent colour; Nixie the warm glow of a nixie tube, for the readouts; Led a segment display. The monitors and the clocks are the tiles that wear a face. Each tile can also choose its own, on its settings page, and follows the theme's unless it does. Default: Standard.

Application settings

Settings ▸ Application ▸ General — three settings that apply to Panels as a whole rather than to any one panel.

Start at Login StartAtLogin: Starts Panels when you sign in to Windows. You are asked once, on the first run, rather than being opted in silently. Default: off. Not shown on the Microsoft Store version, which Windows starts through its own setting.
Hide Taskbar HideTaskbar: Hides Windows' own taskbar. On by default, because Panels is a taskbar replacement and leaving both up is rarely what anyone wants — turn it off to run the two side by side. Default: on.
Hide Desktop Icons HideDesktopIcons: Hides the icons on the desktop. Also on the panel's right-click menu. Default: off.

Tile reference

Tiles marked Premium need a license; everything marked Free works without one, with no time limit. More about licensing. Every tile also has the size, alignment and visualizer settings described above; only what each tile adds is listed here.

Clock Free

The time and date, at whatever size you give it. Add it more than once for more time zones.

24 Hour 24Hour: 24-hour time when on, 12-hour when off. Default: whatever Windows is set to.

Calendar Free

A month view, optionally with your appointments on it.

Show events ShowEvents: Show appointments on the calendar. Default: on.
Outlook calendar UseOutlook: Read appointments from Outlook on this PC. Default: on.
Calendar feeds IcsUrls: Published calendar links, one per line. In Outlook: Settings ▸ Calendar ▸ Shared calendars ▸ Publish a calendar, then paste the .ics link here. Google and iCloud provide similar links.

Weather Free

Current conditions for a place. Add the tile more than once for more than one city.

Location Location: The place to show, typed as you would say it. Leave it empty and the tile works out where you are.
Celsius Units: Celsius when on, Fahrenheit when off. Default: Fahrenheit.

Shortcuts Free

Pinned applications and running windows — a taskbar replacement. Drop a file or a shortcut on it to pin it.

Source Source: Where this tile's pins come from. System is Windows' own taskbar pins, so the tile mirrors the taskbar. Any other source is a set of pins belonging to this tile alone, kept in its own folder — which is how a second panel, on another display, gets a different set of shortcuts from the first. Two tiles pointing at the same source stay in step. Default: System.
Show Context HoverShowContext: A context menu appears when the pointer rests on a shortcut. Default: off.
Show Previews HoverShowPreviews: If the application is running, a live preview of its window appears on hover. Default: on.
Monochrome Icons MonochromeIcons: Draws the icons in a single colour instead of their own. Default: off.

Start Free

The Windows shell buttons, on their own tile.

Start Start: The Start button. Default: on.
Task View TaskView: The Task View button. Default: on.
Widgets Widgets: The Windows Widgets button. Default: on.
Notifications Notifications: The notification centre button. Default: off.
Panels Panels: Opens the Panel Manager. Default: on.
AI Chat Chat: A chat with Codex in a window of its own, with no project behind it — the same chat the AI Agents window offers, kept separately. Only on offer while the ChatGPT app is installed, which is where Codex comes from. Default: on.

System Free

The system tray — the icons Windows puts in the corner of its own taskbar — plus a few buttons of Panels' own. The tray icons themselves are always shown; the settings below control the extra buttons beside them.

Shutdown Shutdown: A power button. Default: on.
User User: The signed-in user, with sign-out and lock. Default: on.
Keyboard Keyboard: The touch keyboard button. Default: off.
Battery Battery: The battery indicator. Hides itself on a machine with no battery. Default: on.

Battery Free

Battery charge on a tile of its own, and it hides itself when there is no battery. No settings.

Virtual Desktops Free

Live thumbnails of your virtual desktops. Click to switch, drag a window from one to another, double-click to open Task View.

Show Numbers ShowNumbers: Number each desktop. Default: on.
Tile Size TileSize: How large each desktop is drawn within the tile. Default: Auto.

Pictures Free

A slideshow of your own pictures. Arrows appear at either side while the pointer is over the tile, for stepping forward and back.

Folders Sources: The folders pictures come from. Add Folders… to add more. Default: your Pictures folder.
Include Subfolders IncludeSubfolders: Look inside folders within those folders. Default: on.
Change Every IntervalSeconds: Seconds each picture stays up. Default: 30.
Shuffle Shuffle: Random order rather than in order. Default: on.
Fit Fit: Fill fills the tile and crops what does not fit; Fit shows the whole picture, letterboxed; Stretch distorts it to the tile's shape; Center shows it at its own size. Default: Fill.
Transition Transition: None, Fade, Slide, or Zoom — a cross-fade with a slow drift larger, the push a documentary gives a still. Default: Fade.
Frame Frame: None, Line, Rounded, Mat, Classic, Gold, Polaroid or Film. Default: Line.
Effect Effect: None, Grayscale, Sepia or Vignette. Default: None.
Ken Burns KenBurns: Each picture slowly pans and zooms for as long as it is up, the way a documentary moves across a still. Default: off.

Calculator, Recycle Bin, Spacer Free

A full calculator with memory keys; a working Recycle Bin you can drop files onto; and a spacer for pushing tiles apart. None of the three has settings of its own.

CPU Monitor Free

Processor load, with a live graph and a readout.

Grid Grid: Draw grid lines on the graph. The graph's border stays either way. Default: on.
Zoom Zoom: Scale the graph to whatever is happening, so low activity is still readable rather than a flat line along the bottom. Only in effect while Grid is on. Default: off on the CPU, GPU and memory monitors, which already read against a full scale; on for the network and disk monitors, whose everyday throughput is a sliver of what the hardware can do.

Battery Monitor Free

Battery level over time, as a graph. No settings.

GPU, Memory, Network and Disk Monitors Premium

The same graph and readout for the rest of the machine, and each has the same Grid and Zoom settings as the CPU monitor. Two of them do more than watch:

Memory has a memory cleaner — hover the tile and click the button that appears.
Network shows your IP address, and its button opens a scanner that lists the devices on your network.

FPS Monitor Premium

Frame rate for whatever is running full screen, with 1% and 0.1% lows.

Graph maximum GraphMaximum: Top of the graph in frames per second. 0 scales it automatically. Default: 0.
Show CPU and GPU ShowCpuGpu: Show processor and graphics load alongside the frame rate. Default: on.
Show 0.1% low ShowPointOne: Use the 0.1% low as the headline low instead of the 1%. Default: off.

The FPS tile is 64-bit only. It reads its frame rate through Intel's PresentMon, which ships x64-only, so an ARM64 install does not offer the tile even with a license.

Media Premium

Album art, artist and track with transport controls, for any player that reports to Windows. Click the tile to choose between sources when more than one is playing.

Visualizer: An audio visualizer of its own, inside the tile's artwork area — including two bar visualizers that belong to this tile and are not available anywhere else. Separate from, and usable alongside, the tile's general visualizer setting.

Stock Premium

Quotes and daily change for the symbols you choose, with detail on hover.

Symbols Symbols: The ticker symbols to follow, added and removed one at a time, and reorderable. A new tile starts with AAPL, MSFT, NVDA and SPCX.

Folder Premium

A folder on your panel. Click the tile and its contents open in a window beside it, with real icons and thumbnails, laid out the way Explorer lays them out. Subfolders open in the same window, and Back (or Backspace) goes up; the combo at the top says where you are and jumps back along the way you came. Not only ordinary folders: the special ones work too — Control Panel, This PC, the installed apps list — and so does the registry, browsed key by key.

Across the top of the window: New, for a folder or a file; cut, copy, paste, rename, share and delete for what is selected, the same as Explorer's; then Sort, View and the … menu.

Adding the tile asks which folder straight away, and cancelling that question discards the tile rather than leaving an empty one behind. Dropping a folder onto a panel creates the tile already pointing at it, and dragging the tile off the panel removes it again. FolderPath

View View: How the contents are shown, from the View button. Medium icons, Large icons and Extra large icons are a grid of icons with names under them, at three sizes; Details is a row per entry with its name, date, type, size and tags under a header row; Menu is the original cascading menu off the tile, with no window at all. Default: Medium icons.
Sort SortBy, SortDescending: By Name, Date, Type, Size or Tags, ascending or descending, from the Sort button. Default: Name, ascending.
Single click SingleClickOpen: Open an item with one click rather than two. One setting for every Folder tile; the registry is always single-click. Default: on.
New window: On the … menu, or Shift+click a folder: opens it in a window of its own, cascaded from the first, and both stay up while you work between them.

The window is a popup until you pin it; pinned, it stops sizing to its contents and is yours to size. Drag a file over the tile and its folder opens for the drop; hover a subfolder while dragging and that opens too, so a file can be dropped several levels down without letting go. Folders that cannot be sorted or viewed every way — the registry — hide the choices that do not apply.

AI Agents Premium

The coding agents at work on this machine — Claude Code and Codex — on one tile, with a window for talking to all of them. The tile shows a row per session: the project it is in, what it is doing, and whether it is waiting on you, with how full its context is. Click the tile and the window opens.

The window

Each session is a card down the left: its project and branch, the model, its state and how long it has been in it, with a live picture of its terminal when it has one. Choose a card and the right-hand side is that agent's conversation — what you asked, what it said, every file it read or changed and every command it ran — with an input box under it. Type there and press Enter and the agent gets it exactly as if you had typed into its terminal. Ctrl+F finds text in the output.

New: Starts a session in a folder you choose, with no terminal window of its own — the agent runs hidden and you work with it from here. With more than one agent installed, the button drops a list of them.
Chat: A chat with Codex outside any project, in a window that slides out over the agents window. See The chat windows.
Permission prompts and questions: When an agent asks before running a command or editing a file, or asks you a question, the prompt appears under the output with its answers as buttons. Press the number of an answer, click it, or type a reply. Esc refuses. Prompts queue, so an agent that asks twice is answered twice, and a prompt that arrived while Panels was closed is still picked up from the terminal.
Mode: The agent's permission mode — how much it does without asking — as a combo under the output. Claude Code's are Default, Accept edits, Plan and Auto; Codex's are Default, Read only, Auto and Full access.
Prompt history: Press Up in an empty input and a list of what you typed to that agent before drops down, newest at the bottom. Up and Down move through it, Enter takes one into the box, Esc closes it.
Suggestions: When an agent suggests what to type next, the suggestion shows faintly in the input. Tab or Right takes it while the box is empty.
End, play and trash: Hover a card for its buttons. End closes a session Panels started. An ended session stays listed with a play button, whoever started it, which starts it again in the same folder with its conversation intact; the trash takes it off the list. Nothing is deleted — the conversation stays in the agent's own history.
Teams: A Claude Code session leading a team shows its teammates under it, each with its own state and activity, and their prompts come through the lead. Switched on per machine — see Settings.
The … menu: Output font size, whether to show subagent activity in the output, and whether to show tool results — what each command and file read returned — or only that they ran.

The window also says when an agent needs you elsewhere: an update installed and waiting for a restart, a sign-in that has lapsed, a usage limit reached, or its context compacted.

The chat windows

Two chats with Codex, with no project behind them: the Chat button in the agents window, and AI Chat on the Start tile. Each is its own conversation, shown as bubbles — yours on the right, the agent's on the left — and each is kept by Codex itself, so it is there again after a restart and appears in the ChatGPT app's chat list too. Under the output: the mode — Default asks before touching anything, Auto writes inside your own folder and asks for the rest, Full access never asks — then Clear chat, which deletes the conversation and starts a new one, and Interrupt while it is working. The input has the same prompt history as the agents window, and remembers what you were typing if the window closes under you. The … menu holds the font size.

Settings

The tile's settings page is about the machine rather than the panel, because every session of a kind shares it.

Claude Code hooks: The one-time setup that lets Panels answer Claude Code's prompts and questions, see each terminal and type into it. On, Panels adds its hooks to ~/.claude/settings.json; off removes them. Sessions you start in your own terminals are seen either way once the hooks are in.
Allow agent teams: Sessions started from Panels can work as a team — a lead and teammates — when you ask the lead for one. Sessions in your own terminals are not affected. Default: off.

What each agent needs. Claude Code: installed and signed in, as you already have it for your terminal. Codex: the ChatGPT app for Windows, which brings Codex with it; Panels runs that copy hidden. Neither is bundled with Panels.

Picture in Picture Windows Premium

Live thumbnails of running windows, controllable from the panel.

Maintain Z-order MaintainZOrder: Order the thumbnails to match the windows' own front-to-back order on the desktop. Default: on.
Auto-hide Titles AutoHideTitles: Hide each thumbnail's title until you hover it. Default: off.
Overlay Icon OverlayIcon: Draw each window's application icon over its thumbnail. Default: on.
Wheel Cycle Foreground WheelCycle: Cycle through windows with the mouse wheel while the pointer is over the tile. Default: off.
Tile Size TileSize: How large each thumbnail is drawn. Default: Auto.
Spacing Spacing: The gap between thumbnails. Default: 2.
Show Context HoverShowContext: A context menu on hover. Default: off.
Show Preview HoverShowPreview: A larger live preview on hover. Default: on.
Activate HoverActivate: Bring the window to the front on hover, without a click. Default: off.

Web Browser Premium

A live web page on your panel — video, chat, a dashboard. Set the site from the tile's own bar; there is no settings page.

Viewing mode LastMode, LastWidgetMode, LastDetachedMode: Desktop, Tablet or Phone layout. Remembered separately for a bar, for a widget panel, and for the tile floated out on its own, because a narrow strip on an edge suits the phone layout and a resizable window suits the desktop one — so moving between them lands on the right layout each time. Default: Phone on a bar, Desktop as a widget.
Detach: On the tile's own menu, beside its viewing modes: lifts the browser into a window of its own, which opens at 1100×800 the first time, and puts it back.
Site LastSite, LastSource: The page the tile goes back to, recorded as you browse.

HTML Premium

One of your own HTML pages, on a tile. Pages live in their own folders under %APPDATA%\Lucinite\Panels\HTML; the button beside the setting opens the folder for the selected page.

Page Page: Which page this tile shows, by name — never its markup and never its path. That is what lets a shared .panel carry a reference to a page rather than somebody's script, and what lets you edit the page without telling every tile showing it.

Visualizers Some free

Visualizers are not tiles — they are chosen from the Visualizer setting on a panel or on a tile, and they react to whatever is playing.

Glow Free — a soft audio-reactive glow.
Fish Free — clownfish, minnows and a shark.
Waveform Premium — a liquid rainbow waveform.

Window actions

Settings ▸ Application ▸ Actions controls any window on your desktop, not just Panels' own. Drag the cross hairs onto a window to create an entry: Panels fills in what it can, and from then on applies the action whenever a window matching it appears.

Identify

Which window the action is about. Each field has a match type of its own — Matches exactly, Begins, Ends, Contains, or Any, which ignores the field. Use as many fields as it takes to describe exactly one window and no others.

Process Process, ProcessMatchType: The program's name or path.
Title Title, TitleMatchType: The text in the title bar. Useful for telling two windows of the same program apart, but remember that a title often changes as the window is used.
Class Class, ClassMatchType: The window class name — the most precise of the three, and the one least likely to change.

Actions

Each action has its own recurrence: Disabled leaves that part alone, Once applies it the first time the window appears and not again, and Always applies it every time. That is what separates "put this window here when it opens" from "keep it here however it is moved".

Left, Top Left, Top, PositionRecurrence: Where to put the window. Position defaults to Once.
Width Width, WidthRecurrence: How wide to make it. Default: Disabled.
Height Height, HeightRecurrence: How tall to make it. Default: Disabled.
Desktop Desktop, DesktopRecurrence: The virtual desktop to move the window to. Default: desktop 1, Disabled.
Activate ActivateDesktop: Switch to that desktop when the window is moved to it, rather than moving it out from under you. Default: off.
State State: Maximize, Minimize, Restore, or Disabled to leave the window's state alone. Default: Disabled.
Layer ZOrder: Normal, Top to keep the window above ordinary windows, Bottom to push it behind them, or Disabled. Default: Disabled.
Enabled Enabled: Whether the entry runs at all — a way to shelve an action without deleting it. Default: on.

Panel Manager

The Panels button on the Start tile opens the Panel Manager: every panel you have, grouped by the display it lives on. Each entry is a button — click it to start or stop that panel. It is a live view, so a panel switched on or off anywhere else updates here too, and it can be pinned open.

Games

Across the top of the Panel Manager is a row of games. They are played with windows rather than in one: every piece is a real panel wearing your theme's background, corners and acrylic, moved around the desktop as the game runs. Press a game to start it, and press the same button again to stop it.

Panel Paddle: Pong. Two bars at the edges of the screen and a ball travelling between them. Unlike the original, the paddles go anywhere — yours is dragged in both axes, so you can cut the ball off rather than only rise to it, and the computer's does the same.
The ball waits until you pick your paddle up; there is no start button of its own. A click picks it up, a click puts it down, and it follows the pointer in between with the button up. Put it down whenever you like — the rally carries on without you, which is usually a point for the computer. Every point puts it down for you, so the next rally starts the way the first one did.
Panel Pew: Asteroids. The rocks are windows the size of tiles, in every width and height Panels supports, which makes a field of them look like a desktop coming apart rather than a game drawn over one. Shoot a rock and it breaks into smaller panels; break it down to one tile square and the next shot scores it.
The ship is the mouse — click it to take hold and it flies where the pointer flies. Hold the left button to fire, or use Space if you would rather. Tapping that same button lets the ship go, as does Esc. The right button is left alone throughout, because it belongs to whatever is under the pointer rather than to the game.
Panel Pilot: Lunar Lander. One ship — Panel Pew's, arrowhead and flame — falling under gravity towards the bottom of the play area, and one landing pad to put it on. Land slowly, level and with fuel to spare and the next pad is narrower, the gravity a little stronger and the tank a little smaller; land anywhere else, or too fast, or on a tilt, and the ship comes apart the way a rock does in Pew.
The ship is not the mouse this time. Click it to take hold and the nose points at the pointer; hold the button and it burns that way — put the pointer where you want to be pushed and squeeze. A tap lets go, as does Esc. On the keys: turn with A and D, burn with W, the up arrow or Space. The board counts levels — a level being a landing — on the same scoreboard the other two games share.

Wallpaper

Wallpaper on the panel's right-click menu opens the picker. Click an image to make it your desktop background. Images come from C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Themes.

Licensing

Panels is free to use. The premium tiles unlock with a one-off purchase, made in the app.

Open Settings ▸ Application ▸ About.
Use Upgrade to Pro, which takes you to the Microsoft Store to complete the purchase.
The premium tiles appear without restarting.

Without a license the premium tiles and visualizers are still listed — in the tile list and the visualizer choices — greyed, by name alone. Choosing one says it is a Pro feature and offers the About page, where the purchase is.

Panels is distributed through the Microsoft Store, so your purchase travels with your Microsoft account rather than with a license file — there is nothing to save, and nothing to reinstall on a new computer beyond signing in and installing Panels again.

For developers

Tiles, visualizers, games and AI agent providers are all components, and you can write your own. Install SDK, on Settings ▸ Application ▸ About, writes the SDK into an SDK folder beside Panels and opens it: three assemblies with their documentation, which is what shows in IntelliSense.

Lucinite.UI.Component.Interface: The tile model: a component declares what it is, and a control is what goes on the panel. A control states its sizes, how it is drawn, and a set of flags for what it asks of its panel — a settings page, a context menu, to fill a widget window, to grow into spare length on a bar, to stay out of widget mode, to move while the panel is locked, to ask for a shortcut button, or to keep the panel from taking focus. A tile can ask its panel to detach it, gather or disperse the panel's tiles, lock the panel, or open the Panel Manager. Games are the same assembly: a game is a set of panels wearing the user's theme, moved by your code.
Lucinite.Core.Interface: Configuration containers and items — the same .panel and Panels.config storage the built-in tiles use, with change events — and the logging the app writes to.
Lucinite.AIAgents: The AI Agents provider model. A provider lists its sessions, each with a state, an activity, a conversation of events, the prompt it is waiting on and the ways to answer it; the window and the tile show whatever a provider reports. Claude Code and Codex are providers; mark a class in your component and the tile finds it.

A released Panels loads only components signed by Lucinite. A developer license, available on request, lets it load yours as well: it runs a single panel named Developer, for building against, and nothing else. The file the Pictures, Folder or Example tiles are built from is the shape to copy.