Serpentines

Serpentines is an engine for desktop customization. It brings playful, GPU‑accelerated effects to your desktop — starting with customizable cursor trails — and will grow into a platform for desktop buddies, animations, and User-defined overlays. It’s native, fast, and lightweight, powered by Rust.

Status: early preview. The immediate focus is a polished cursor‑trails experience. Next, we’ll add desktop buddies with configurable behaviors and state machines, plus shareable presets and overlay widgets.

Crates

• serpentines-core/: engine logic (particles, presets, serialization)
• serpentines-ui/: eframe-driven main window UI logic
• serpentines-platform/: platform abstraction traits
• serpentines-win/: Windows implementations (overlay, input, tray)
• serpentines-app/: application entry point

Build

cargo build

Run

cargo run -p serpentines-app

Roadmap

• Cursor Trails 1.0: Smooth, low‑latency trails with presets (color/shape/decay), per‑monitor support, and quick toggles.
• Preset Ecosystem: Import/export shareable trail packs (human‑readable format + optional assets).
• Control Panel: Native settings window for live tweaking and managing presets.
• System Tray: Lightweight tray with enable/disable, mode switching, and links to settings.
• Desktop Buddies: Animated characters with customizable state machines and interactions (click/drag, follow, idle behaviors).
• Customizable Overlays: Widgets and visual stickers anchored to the desktop with themes.
• Cross‑Platform: macOS/Linux support following the Windows-first foundation.