The Windows desktop has remained largely unchanged for the past three decades. You can follow the modern desktop paradigm Windows 95 or so it’s home to all sorts of app shortcuts, as well as being able to place your saved files directly into it. The desktop is open Windows 11 functionally still the same.
Maybe that’s why programs like Rain gauge became popular as a way to make the desktop more useful, or at least more visually appealing. There is now a player named Themia on the field. I learned about this app through its creator and it was billed as a Rainmeter alternative. I immediately wanted to try it and yes, I believe it can be better than Rainmeter.
Turn your desktop into a dashboard
Productivity center, always available
Themia can be seen as a Rainmeter alternative, but I’d really say they do quite different things. Rainmeter is all about visual customization, although more practical widgets are definitely available. But Themia is working on productivity and bringing more information directly to the most durable screen on your computer: the desktop.
There isn’t a pool of community-created widgets yet, and I don’t know if there are plans to support third-party widgets at some point, but the ones included in the app itself are more useful to me than anything I’ve seen in Rainmeter. These widgets include an email folder, a calendar with online sync, information from GitHub, a pomodoro timer, and more. includes They are all very practical, useful things that I want to get into quickly. Arguably, the only thing more visual is the photo album widget, which gives you a slideshow of images.
There are already several dozen widgets to choose from, and all of them are already quite useful. I’m not much of a GitHub user, so the widgets associated with it aren’t really for me, but for everything I can see they have a purpose. You can also create different views that let you switch between sets of widgets with a single click. If you want, you can have several widgets of the same type on the desktop.
The free version of the app has some notable limitations that only allow you to lock in a maximum of ten widgets in two views (widgets count cumulatively), but $19 a one-time fee isn’t too much if you find it useful, and I think it is.
My ideal desk
Information at a glance
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of a dashboard that holds all the information I like to keep track of, and it’s something I’ve been exploring recently with self-managed dashboards for my web browser. But Themia brings it directly to my desktop, and it does some things better than a typical standalone dashboard.
As I already mentioned, 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’ve always appreciated, even without a full-featured email client. Just the important ones that catch my eye are very useful, so I like having an email widget with all those accounts.
RSS feeds are an old-school technology that I still love to use, and Themia can also create a widget to deliver news from almost any source directly to my desktop, which I love. The calendar is another widget that I like to have here. Self-managed dashboards like Homarr have a calendar widget, but it pulls from Nextcloud, and I don’t really use Nextcloud for calendaring. I like that I can pull directly from my cloud accounts with Themia, although for some reason the Google Calendar integration is more complicated than it should be because it requires using a manual CalDAV setup. Setting up Microsoft accounts is easier.
Other additions that I find useful is a file browser window that can show me the contents of any folder on my computer right on the desktop. This is actually a feature you have to pay for with something like Stardock’s Fences app, so it’s great to have it here for free. Another thing is an add-on that I can throw in here for more possibilities. There’s a notepad that I can use for quick notes to keep on the desktop, as well as an equivalent widget, but for handwriting or sketches. The shortcut widget is also useful because it can link to apps, files, or websites, giving you quick access to whatever you want.
It is very easy to use
This is not a rain gauge
As great as Rainmeter can be, after my past experiences with it, I’ve never touched the app again, nor have I felt the urge to. Customizing Rainmeter, as seen above, puts the work entirely in the hands of the user, not only to configure these widgets, but also to know where to find them. There is no easily accessible repository of widgets that you can easily add to Rainmeter.
Themia is the complete opposite. The supply of widgets may be more limited overall, but once you install the app and see the customization window, you can easily see all the options available to you. You can see each widget and the options to customize it, add online accounts (for widgets that use them) in a compact, beautiful and simplified UI.
Resizing and moving widgets is as easy as dragging and dropping them on the grid, and making any changes is simple. For many widgets, you can adjust the layout and choose more detailed settings for how the 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 the widgets, as well as their borders and transparency levels. You can’t change these settings per widget, but it’s obviously not a huge limitation.
Themia is also very light. The full installer is less than 6MB and has no resource usage to speak of in Task Manager while the program is running.
Some improvements are needed
Rough edges are expected
Themia is a very new software, its first release on GitHub was in April of this year, and updates are made very often. While progress has been rapid, I did notice a few issues with the latest release during testing.
One was in the email widget, where double-clicking to open an email takes me to a File Explorer window that pops up in that window. System 32 folder. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on behind the scenes, but of course this is not expected behavior. The only case of it happening is for accounts synced via IMAP, and the Microsoft account works fine, but it’s still weird.
There is also an issue with folder widgets, which could be a bug or just an oversight. You can change whether to open folders in that folder in File Explorer or navigate directly within the widget, but if you choose to navigate within the widget, there’s no easy way to return to the original folder created for the widget. There’s no mechanism for moving up a level in the folder tree, which makes it hard to recommend this approach if you always want to access the same folder. For now, I’m just specifying folders to open in File Explorer.
I love Themia already
Even at this early stage, and with some greatness, I’m already loving Themia as a tool to make my desktop more useful. It’s not as fancy as Rainmeter, but the ease of use and customization alone make Themia very easy to recommend in my eyes. I also prefer a more hands-on approach to widgets than the visual customization focus that Rainmeter seems to have. We hope the app continues to improve and third-party widgets become a viable option. There’s potential for something really big here, and I think it’s worth checking out.
