A Dynamic Island for the top of your screen, on Windows and macOS.

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A notch at the edge of your Windows or Mac screen that opens on hover, click or Ctrl + Alt + Space and holds the tools you reach for all day: about thirty of them, each one on or off as you like. Free and open source, no account, nothing to pay.

The video above shows them in under two minutes, and the demo on the project page lets you try every tool in your browser before you install anything.

Closed, Crest is a single row: the song, a running timer, your AI limits, CPU, RAM and GPU, the network, the battery, the clock, the weather, the next meeting. When something happens it turns into a card for a few seconds, then goes back.

While a song plays it can show the lyric line instead of the title. It asks before an AI agent runs a command, warns you before an AI limit runs out and puts the next meeting's call one click away. Headphones, volume, the microphone, the charger and a finished timer each get a moment of their own.

Every tool below lives in the same notch. Pick yours in Settings → Tools and drag them into the order you like; the rest stays out of the way. The full guide, with the setup steps of each integration, is in docs/features.md.

• Three looks: a notch that hugs the edge, a capsule you drag to any height, or a thin line with the song's progress. On the top, bottom, left or right edge, in the size you choose.
• The row shows the parts you pick, in your order, rotating when they don't fit: cover, timer, title or the current lyric line, AI quota rings, CPU, RAM, GPU, network, power, battery, temperature, clock, GitHub, weather, the next event, downloads, and parts your own scripts set.
• Notices take the row for a moment: a finished timer, a due to-do, a meeting about to start, a download or screenshot just saved, a quota alert, the charger, Bluetooth, the internet, Caps Lock, volume and brightness.
• Privacy dots turn green while the microphone or camera is in use and red while the screen is recorded.
• A pet in a nest beside the notch, if you want one: it dances to the music and runs faster the busier the CPU is.

• Now Playing controls any player with a Windows media session, with cover, progress and a live equalizer.
• Synced lyrics from LRCLIB, Kugou and NetEase, word by word where the source times words, also in the closed notch.
• Translation and romanisation: the source's translation, or one made on your PC with the offline models Firefox uses, into the language you pick. Japanese, Chinese and Korean in Latin letters.
• Discord: your voice call with who is talking, and buttons to mute, deafen and hang up.

• Timer with focus and break presets, six alarm sounds, a background sound for focus and a dozen looks, from pixel digits to a flip clock.
• Clocks for up to 12 cities, with a slider that moves the time a day either way, and sunrise, sunset, golden hour and the moon.
• Break reminders: every 20 minutes for the eyes and every hour for a real break, counted from the time you actually spend at the computer. They wait during presentations, full-screen apps and Do Not Disturb.
• Habits with five weeks of dots and a streak that forgives the odd missed day.
• Calendar from ICS links (Google, Outlook, iCloud) or CalDAV, with a notice before each event and a join button for online meetings.
• Water against a daily goal, with reminders between the hours you set.

• To-dos with projects, due times and reminders. Type "call Marco tomorrow 9am" and the task gets the time (in English and Italian).
• Notes saved as you type, and a Scratchpad with syntax colouring for code.
• Clipboard history of text, links, images and files, never written to disk. Small chips decode a JWT, a Unix time, Base64, JSON or a link full of tracking.
• Shelf to park files by dropping them on the notch, and Send to phone: scan a QR code and the phone downloads them from your PC over your own network.
• Prompter: a teleprompter that scrolls your script at the speed you set, with a mirror mode.

• Overview: time, weather, the song playing, focus, keep awake, volume, brightness, and quick switches for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, the dark theme and the microphone.
• Calc: a notebook calculator that reads units, dates, percentages, currencies and variables.
• Converter for units, and currencies at the European Central Bank's rates.
• Colour: pick a colour anywhere on the screen, copy it as HEX, RGB, HSL or OKLCH, check its contrast and see its harmonies.
• Weather now, hour by hour and for the week, from Open-Meteo.
• Portfolio: your brokers in one currency, read only.

• Terminal: PowerShell or Command Prompt inside the notch.
• Hardware: CPU, GPU, RAM, network, power, temperatures, the busiest processes and FPS in games, plus the ports your PC listens on and the program behind each one.
• AI usage: your limits for Claude, ChatGPT, Antigravity, Cursor and more, with a line that says where each one is heading and an optional notice when it resets.
• Ask: a chat with the AI provider you choose, with your own key.
• Agents: the Claude Code sessions running on your PC, what each one waits for, and the command to resume it.
• GitHub contribution calendar and streaks, and a Launcher for your pinned apps.
• crest-notify lets scripts and builds send notices, ask a question with buttons, or put their own part in the closed row.

• Screenshots of every screen, one screen or a region, and recordings with system audio and the microphone.
• Recorder for sound only, from the microphone, the system audio or both.
• Camera as a mirror before a call, and Find on screen, which reads the text on every screen and searches it.

• Windows notifications in the notch, with a history page, and a Copy code button when one holds a one-time code. Windows' own banners can be turned off, so each notification shows once.
• Vault for passwords and 2FA codes, behind a PIN or Windows Hello, never in the clipboard history.
• Presentation mode hides the clipboard, balances, the vault and your captures while you share the screen, and Hide Crest from screen sharing keeps every Crest window out of Teams, Zoom, Discord and OBS.

• Themes: fifteen built in, an editor, sixteen fonts, coloured icons and a day and night switch.
• Window rules for full-screen apps and games, any monitor or all of them, and every panel resized to taste.
• 11 languages: English, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic right to left, French, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German and Italian.
• Plugins: your own tools in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, sandboxed (docs/plugins.md).

What changed in each version is in the release notes.

• Microsoft Store: Crest Island, signed by Microsoft and kept up to date by the Store.
• Installer: download Crest_x.y.z_x64-setup.exe (or Crest_x.y.z_arm64-setup.exe on a Windows on ARM PC) from the latest release and run it. It installs for your user only. The installer is not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may warn on first launch: click More info → Run anyway.
• Portable: unzip Crest-x.y.z-Portable-x64.zip (or -Portable-arm64.zip) anywhere you can write to and run Crest.exe. Nothing is installed.
• Mac (preview): download Crest_x.y.z_aarch64.dmg for Apple silicon or Crest_x.y.z_x64.dmg for Intel and drag Crest to Applications. The app is not notarized yet, so macOS refuses it on first launch: open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway. Shelf, Hardware, Discord, Vault, Terminal, Launcher, Notices, Capture, Recorder, Camera and Plugins are Windows-only for now and don't show on a Mac, nor do the Focus, Keep awake and volume tiles in Overview, FPS, the recording dots and the monitor modes Follow the cursor and All monitors. Find on screen has no shortcut there.

Every release has a SHA256SUMS file with the SHA-256 of each download, to check with sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missing or Get-FileHash.

Windows 11 or Windows 10, 64-bit (x64 or ARM64), or macOS 12 or later on Apple silicon or Intel (preview).

No account, no analytics, no tracking. Settings and data stay on your machine, keys live in the Windows Credential Manager (the Keychain on a Mac), and Crest goes online by itself only for the weather in Overview, the daily update check and the AI usage rings of the services you are signed in to; everything else waits until you set it up. What goes over the network, and when: PRIVACY.md.

Crest is free, with no ads and no paid tier. If it is useful to you, sponsor it on GitHub Sponsors, star the repository or suggest an idea.

Building from source and contributing: CONTRIBUTING.md.

Crest is a modified version of L4-Notchbar by Linux5Real, forked from version 1.6.0 on 31 October 2026. The commit history lists every change since then.

• The Antigravity quota reader comes from an upstream pull request by Fraustiz.
• The LRCLIB lookup (exact match, search fallback by length, cleanup of video titles) follows an upstream pull request by mhmmdazizy (L4-Notchbar PR #13).
• The layout of the collapsed row, the carousel timing, the capsule placement rules, the per-app audio capture, the way live notices learn of new Windows notifications from the event log, the screen-edge frame, the side column, the portable packaging, the window and app rules, the shortcut text and the panel sizes and scale are translated from BrimDeck (Apache-2.0, license text in licenses/BrimDeck-LICENSE).
• The panel themes, their readability correction and the day and night switch are translated from BrimDeck too (docs/themes.md). The One Dark Pro, GitHub, Dracula, Night Owl, Catppuccin, Nord, Rosé Pine, Gruvbox, Solarized and Everforest themes use the colours of those palettes under the MIT License (licenses/theme-palettes-MIT.txt).
• Hiding the Windows volume and brightness indicator follows Bloom (GPL-3.0, license text in licenses/Bloom-LICENSE).
• The notch proportions were derived from NotchDrop (MIT).
• The terminal uses xterm.js (MIT, licenses/xterm-MIT.txt).
• Pinyin for Chinese lyrics comes from rust-pinyin (MIT, licenses/pinyin-MIT.txt). Kanji readings use JMdict by the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (CC BY-SA 4.0) in the jmdict-simplified format, downloaded on demand and not shipped with Crest.
• The text is set in Inter (SIL Open Font License 1.1, licenses/Inter-OFL.txt), bundled through Fontsource.
• The icons are Phosphor (MIT, licenses/Phosphor-MIT.txt).
• The calendar maps Windows time zone names to IANA names with the table from jiff (MIT, licenses/jiff-LICENSE), which also supplies the time zone database.
• The QR code that sends Shelf files to a phone comes from qrcodegen by Project Nayuki (MIT, licenses/qrcodegen-MIT.txt).
• Weather data is by Open-Meteo.com, under CC BY 4.0; the installers, the Store package and the portable zip carry the licence texts in LICENSE and licenses/.
• The design follows Apple's Dynamic Island and the macOS app OmniNotch. Crest is not affiliated with Apple or OmniNotch.
• Crest is an independent app by Andrea Loroni. It is not made, sponsored or endorsed by Microsoft.

GPL-3.0. You may use, study, change and share this project, also commercially, but any version you distribute must stay open source under the same license and keep the copyright notices.

Crest is a fork of L4-Notchbar 1.6.0. The source code of every release, including the Microsoft Store builds, is in this repository: each release has a version tag that points to the exact code it was built from.