The Windows desktop has remained essentially unchanged over the past three decades. You can trace the modern desktop paradigm back to Windows 95 or so, when it became a home to all kinds of app shortcuts as well as being able to just house files you save directly to it. The desktop on Windows 11 is still functionally the same.
Perhaps because of that, apps such as Rainmeter have become popular as a way to make the desktop more useful, or at least more visually appealing. And now, there’s a now player in the field, called Themia. I found out about this app through its creator, and it was billed as a Rainmeter alternative. I immediately wanted to give it a go, and yes, I believe this has potential to be even better than Rainmeter.
Turn your desktop into a dashboard
A productivity hub, always available
Themia can be seen as a Rainmeter alternative, but really, I’d say they do remarkably different things. Rainmeter is all about visual customization, though more practical widgets definitely do exist. But Themia is all in on productivity and bringing more information directly to the most persistent screen on your PC: the desktop.
There isn’t a pool of community-created widgets yet, nor do I know if there are plans for third-party widgets to be supported at some point, but the ones that are included with the app itself are already far more useful to me than anything I’ve seen on Rainmeter. These widgets include an email folder, a calendar with online sync, information from GitHub, a pomodoro timer, and more. They’re all very practical, useful things that I like to have quick access to it. The only thing that’s arguably more visual is the photo album widget, which gives you a slideshow of images.
There are a couple dozen widgets to choose from already, and they’re all quite useful already. I’m not much of a GitHub user, so the widgets related to it aren’t really for me, but for everything else, I can see them having a purpose. You can also create different views, allowing you to swap between sets of widgets in one click. You can also have multiple of the same kind of widget on the desktop if you want.
The free version of the app has some notable limitations, locking you to a maximum of ten widgets across two views (the widgets count cumulatively), but the one-time $19 isn’t an outrageous amount if you find this useful, and I think it is.
My ideal desktop
Information at a glance
The idea of a dashboard with all the information I like to keep tabs on at a glanced has always been appealing to me, and it’s something I’ve been exploring recently with self-hosted dashboards for my web browser. But Themia brings that to my desktop directly, and it it does some things better than a typical self-hosted dashboard, too.
As I’ve already alluded to, one of those things is email. I have four email accounts (three personal, one for work) that I use semi-regularly, so a unified inbox is something I always appreciate, even if it’s not a fully featured email client. Just having the important things brought to my attention is extremely helpful, so I like to have an email widget with all of those accounts.
RSS feeds are an old-school technology that I still love using to this day, and Themia can also create a widget to bring news from almost any source directly to my desktop, and I love that too. The calendar is another widget I like to have here. Self-hosted dashboards like Homarr do have a calendar widget, but it pulls from Nextcloud, and I don’t really use Nextcloud for my calendar. I like that I can pull directly from my cloud accounts with Themia, though for some reason, the Google Calendar integration is far more complicated than it should be since it requires using a manual CalDAV setup. Microsoft accounts are much easier to set up.
Other additions I find useful are a file browser window, which can show me the contents of any folder on my PC directly on the desktop. That’s actually a feature you’d have to pay for with something like Stardock’s Fences software, so to have it here for free is great. Anything else is an extra I can throw in here for more capabilities. There’s a notepad I can use for quick notes to save on the desktop, as well as an equivalent widget but just for handwriting or sketching. The shortcut widget is also useful, as it can link to apps, files, or websites, givng you quick access to just about anything you want.
It’s so easy to use
Rainmeter this is not
As great as Rainmeter can be, after my past experiments with it, I have never touched that software again, nor did I feel the desire to. Customizing Rainmeter, as seen above, puts the work entirely in the user’s hands, not just for configuring those widgets, but even just knowing where to find them. There isn’t an easily accessible repository of widgets you can add to Rainmeter effortlessly.
Themia is the complete opposite. The supply of widgets may be far more limited overall, but as soon as you install the app and see the customization window, you can easily see all the options available to you. You can see every widget and the options for customizing it, adding online accounts (for widgets that use them), all in a compact, beautiful, and simplistic UI that doesn’t get in the way.
Resizing and moving widgets around is as easy as dragging and dropping them on a grid, and making any changes is just as simple. For a lot of widgets, you can adjust the layout and choose more detailed settings for how content is displayed, but it’s all presented in an accessible way.
There are also some visual customization options that can be changed globally. This includes the accent color and background color for widgets, as well as their borders, plus transparency levels. You can’t change these settings per widget, but that’s frankly not a huge limitation.
Themia is also very lightweight. The full installer comes in at under 6MB, and there’s next to no resource usage to speak of in Task Manager while the app is running.
Some refinements are needed
Rough edges are to be expected
Themia is a very recent app, with the first release on GitHub dating back to April of this year, and updates have been very frequent. While progress has been quick, I did notice a couple of issues with the latest release during my testing.
One of those was in the email widget, where double-clicking an email to open it directs me to a File Explorer window opened to the System32 folder. I’m not entirely sure what goes on behind the scenes, but naturally, that’s not the expected behavior. his only seems toi happen for accounts synced via IMAP, and a Microsoft account works fine, but it’s still odd.
The folder widgets also have a problem, which may be a bug or simply an oversight. You can change whether to open folders within that folder in File Explorer or navigate directly inside the widget, but if you choose to navigate in the widget, there’s no easy way to return to the original folder thew widget was created for. There seems to be no mechanism for going up one level in the folder tree, which makes it hard to recommend this approach if you always want to have access to the same folder. For now, I just set folders to open in File Explorer.
I already love Themia
Even in this early stage, and despite some big, I already love Themia as a tool to make my desktop more useful. It’s not as decorative as Rainmeter can be, but the ease of use and customization alone make Themia much easier to recommend in my eyes. I also prefer the more practical approach to widgets compared to the visual customization focus Rainmeter seems to have. Hopefully, the app keeps improving, and third-party widgets become a viable option. There’s potential for something truly great here, and I think it’s worth checking out.
