GitHub - maxzz/traytools-26: Tray Tools 26 is a Windows desktop utility—a sort of "Swiss Army knife" for power users, developers, and technical support engineers.

Introduction

Tray Tools 26 is a Windows-only desktop utility — a Swiss Army knife for power users, developers, and support engineers. Instead of keeping a dozen small utilities around, you get a single tray-resident app that bundles the everyday tools needed to inspect, tweak, and automate a Windows workstation:

Copy Operations — batched file deployment with a tree editor.
Folder Sync — compare and synchronize folder pairs.
Registry Editor — curated registry tweaks with current vs. new value preview.
Tools Menu — a fully data-driven launcher for programs, folders, URLs, and registry keys.
WinSpy — a Spy++-style inspector of every window on the desktop.
Active Monitor — real-time tracking of foreground/active/focus windows.
Trace Bits — live trace-category management for target processes.

The app lives in the system tray, supports dark and light themes, can stay always on top, collapse into a compact toolbar view, and can raise or drop its own privilege level (administrator ↔ standard user) on demand.

Screenshots

Screenshots below are listed in the same order as they appear in the frontend/src/assets/previews folder.

1. Dark mode — every part of the UI, including the Welcome page, is available in a dark color scheme.

2. Welcome — the landing page: app logo, version and build stamps, and quick navigation to every tool.

3. Copy Operations — a tree editor for batched file copies: groups, nested groups, and separators, each item mapping a source file to a destination folder.

4. Sync — folder-pair synchronization: define source/destination pairs, check for differences, then sync with live progress.

5. Registry — a registry tweak editor showing the current value and the new value side by side, with import/export of JSON and Windows .reg files.

6. Tools — the editor for the data-driven Tools menu: commands, sub-menus, separators, hotkeys, and per-item elevation.

7. WinSpy — a Spy++-style tree of every HWND on the desktop, with style/process properties, on-screen highlighting, and a window picker.

8. Active Monitor — real-time tracking of the foreground, active, focus, and capture windows of whatever app you are working in.

9. Trace Bits — manage trace categories (bit flags) per process and watch live trace output.

10. Options — application settings: theme, always-on-top, elevation, taskbar/tray behavior, hotkeys, and agent integration.

Features in detail

Copy Operations

Designed for repetitive file deployment (for example, dropping freshly built binaries into a test folder).

Operations are organized as a tree: groups, nested groups, separators, and items (sourceFile → destFolder).
Per-group and per-item execution flags:
- stopDpAgent — stop the DPAgent service before copying (avoids locked files).
- requireElevated — run the copy with administrator privileges.
- renameLocked — if the destination file is locked, rename it instead of failing.
After a run, every item is reported as copied, skipped, failed, or renamed.
The tree is stored as plain JSON (copy.json), so it can be edited in the UI or by hand.

Folder Sync

One-way mirror of a source folder onto a destination: new and changed files are copied; files that exist only on the destination are moved to the Recycle Bin.

Define folder pairs (sourceFolder ↔ destFolder) organized in groups.
Check compares the two trees (by file size and modification time) and shows adds / modifies / deletes without touching anything.
Sync applies those differences with per-file progress events. File metadata is preserved.
A pair can be given two named directions (forwardName / reverseName), e.g. "git to test" and "test to git".

Folders and files that are not copied (also left untouched on the destination):

Each sync item has a skip list of regular expressions. Check and Sync skip any file or folder whose name or relative path matches a pattern (paths use /). Matching folders are not entered, so their contents are neither copied nor deleted.
skipPatterns in sync.json:
- omitted (legacy files) — skip ^\.git$ and ^node_modules$ at any depth.
- [] — skip nothing; every file is copied / compared.
- any other array — those patterns. If the list is only the two defaults, the field is not written back.

Source and destination must be different paths and neither may contain the other.

Registry Editor

A curated, repeatable way to apply registry tweaks (tracing flags, feature switches, etc.).

Keys and values are shown as a tree with the current value read live from the registry next to the new value you want to apply — you always see exactly what will change.
Values can be applied selectively, and multiple values per key are supported.
Supported types: REG_SZ, REG_EXPAND_SZ, REG_DWORD, REG_QWORD, REG_BINARY, REG_MULTI_SZ.
Import/export works both with the app's own JSON format and with standard Windows .reg files (Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00, also accepts REGEDIT4, dword:/hex: notations, line continuations). Deletion entries ([-KEY], "name"=-) are skipped with a warning.

Tools Menu

The header Tools menu is fully data-driven from tools.json — edit the file and reopen the menu, no restart required.

Launch executables and URLs, open folders in Explorer, or jump Regedit directly to a key (HKLM\...), even when Regedit is already running.
Supports nested sub-menus (any depth), separators ("menuName": "-"), hotkey labels, and per-item elevation (runElevated).
%VAR% environment variables are expanded; paths with spaces are handled without quotes (longest existing path prefix wins).
The full format reference lives in tools/tools.md.

WinSpy

The tab formerly named Windows. A Spy++-style inspector of the live desktop HWND tree: a resizable split with the window tree on the left and a properties pane on the right.

Tree

Enumerates every top-level window and its children (class name, title, handle, visibility).
Filter by class name or title; Refresh takes a new snapshot; Collapse folds the tree back to top-level windows.
Rows show the process executable icon for top-level windows (and process folders). Child controls use class-based glyphs (button, edit, password field, tabs, toolbar, status bar, scrollbar, and so on).
Selecting a node loads its details in the properties pane and, if auto-highlight is on, outlines that window on screen.

Finder (window picker)

Drag the target from the toolbar onto any on-screen window and release to select that HWND in the tree (the tree is refreshed if needed).
While dragging, this tab’s status bar (always visible here; the global footer-hide setting does not apply) shows screen and client coordinates plus the process name under the cursor.
The drag icon is chosen in Settings: a transparent overlay window, or a replacement system cursor. With the overlay, the pointer can be kept visible or hidden.

Highlight

Highlight on the toolbar toggles an overlay frame around the selected window.
Tree options set blink count (1–10), border width (1–20 px), and border color.
Optionally flash an inline empty bounds / off-screen notice on the tree row when the window rectangle cannot be drawn.

Tree options (gear on the toolbar)

Show window handles — HWND next to each class/title (Spy++ “Show HWND”).
Hide invisible windows — drop nodes whose WS_VISIBLE bit is off; the options popup shows total vs. displayed counts.
Group windows by process name — wrap top-level windows in process folders (exe icon + name). Show process IDs adds the PID next to each folder.
When grouping is on, back / forward buttons walk the process selection history (right-click a button for the list, or clear it). History is session-only.

Properties

General — caption, class (unicode flag), handle, style / extended style (hex plus visible/enabled), window and client rectangles, control ID, instance, user data, parent and owner; then process ID, thread ID, name, full path, 32/64-bit, user, and integrity. The path row can copy the folder or reveal the file in Explorer.
Window Extra — class atom, class style, class/window extra bytes, and decoded window styles / extended styles. The pane options can show each flag as 0x........ NAME.
Selecting a process folder (when grouping is on) shows process-only details: name or PID identity, parent PID (click to jump if that process is in the tree), path, command line, bitness, integrity, and user.

Active Monitor

Polls the Win32 input state every 500 ms and reports the Foreground, Active, Focus, and Capture windows — handle, class name, title, process/thread IDs.
The backend attaches to the foreground thread's input state, so the values reflect the application you are interacting with, not Tray Tools itself (a modern take on the legacy liswatch utility).

Trace Bits

Per-process trace windows with a live trace stream.
Trace categories are toggled as bit flags via checkboxes, making it easy to enable exactly the tracing you need.

Process launching and tracking

Specific processes are launched from the Tools menu (with optional arguments, hotkeys, and elevation) and from the header DPAgent toolbar (start/stop with integrity-level control).
Launch status and window state can then be observed in WinSpy (process path, command line, integrity) and tracked in real time in the Active Monitor.

Window behavior: always-on-top and two sizes

Always on top: a single switch keeps the main window above all other windows — handy when the app is used as a desktop companion next to the program you are debugging.
Two window sizes, toggled from the header:
- Toolbar (mini) view — a compact strip (default 480×72) that keeps the toolbar and agent controls visible while the main content is hidden.
- Normal view — the full UI at a user-defined size; the geometry you choose is remembered.
Both sizes (and which one is active) are persisted in init.json, and the UI also supports zoom controls.

Elevation: raise or drop privileges

Request administrator rights: from Settings (or automatically at startup via runElevated in init.json) the app relaunches itself through ShellExecute with the runas verb, then exits the non-elevated instance.
Downgrade: an elevated instance can relaunch itself at standard user level by spawning the new process as a child of Windows Explorer, so it inherits Explorer's medium integrity instead of the elevated parent's high integrity.
Individual Tools-menu commands can also be marked runElevated without elevating the whole app.

Dark and light themes

The entire UI supports both dark and light color schemes (see the first screenshot). The theme can be switched in Settings and is persisted across runs.

System tray

The app is tray-first: it starts hidden and lives in the system tray ("Tray Tools").
Left-click the tray icon to show/hide the window; right-click for a menu with Show/Hide and Exit.
Optionally the taskbar button can be hidden while the tray icon remains, and the close button can be configured to either quit the app or hide it to the tray.

JSON formats

All editors in the app load and save plain JSON files, so configurations can be version-controlled and edited by hand.

Where the files are loaded from

For each editor config the first existing file wins:

An environment variable override: TRAYTOOLS_COPY, TRAYTOOLS_SYNC, TRAYTOOLS_REGISTRY, or TRAYTOOLS_TOOLS.
<exeDir>\tools\<file>, then <exeDir>\<file> — next to the executable.
.\tools\<file>, then .\<file> — the current working directory (this is what wails dev uses from the project root).
%AppData%\traytools-26-go\tools\<file> — the per-user config directory (default write location).

Ready-to-use samples of every file below live in the tools folder of this repository.

copy.json — Copy Operations

Groups contain items (or nested groups and separators). Item/group flags are only written when true.

{
    "groups": [
        {
            "name": "Deploy",
            "items": [
                {
                    "sourceFile": "C:/work/app/build/app.exe",
                    "destFolder": "C:/work/app-test",
                    "name": "app.exe",
                    "stopDpAgent": true,
                    "requireElevated": true,
                    "renameLocked": true
                },
                { "separator": true, "comment": "docs" },
                {
                    "sourceFile": "C:/work/app/README.md",
                    "destFolder": "C:/work/app-test"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

sync.json — Folder Sync

Optional per-item skipPatterns is an array of regular expressions.

Omit the field to keep the legacy skip of ^\.git$ and ^node_modules$.
Use "skipPatterns": [] to copy and compare every file.
The two default patterns are never written back; only an empty or custom list is stored.

{
    "groups": [
        {
            "name": "Example",
            "items": [
                {
                    "sourceFolder": "C:/work/app",
                    "destFolder": "C:/work/app-test",
                    "forwardName": "git to test",
                    "reverseName": "test to git"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

registry.json — Registry Editor

Each item targets one key (keyPath) and lists the values to set. valueType is one of REG_SZ, REG_EXPAND_SZ, REG_DWORD, REG_QWORD, REG_BINARY, REG_MULTI_SZ.

{
    "groups": [
        {
            "name": "DpTracing",
            "items": [
                {
                    "keyPath": "HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\DigitalPersona\\Tracing",
                    "values": [
                        { "valueName": "TracePath", "valueType": "REG_SZ",    "newValue": "C:\\DPTrace" },
                        { "valueName": "DoTrace",   "valueType": "REG_DWORD", "newValue": "0" }
                    ]
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

The same data can be imported from / exported to standard Windows .reg files:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\DigitalPersona\Tracing]
"DoTrace"=dword:00000000

tools.json — Tools Menu (JSONC)

The Tools menu accepts // and /* … */ comments and tolerates trailing commas. A node is a separator ("menuName": "-"), a sub-menu (has menuItems), or a command (has cmdLine). cmdWhat selects how cmdLine is interpreted: rel (relative to the config folder), abs (absolute path or URL), or reg (registry key to open in Regedit).

{
    "menu": {
        "menuName": "Tools",
        "menuItems": [
            {
                "menuName": "Notepad",
                "cmdLine": "notepad.exe",
                "cmdWhat": "abs",          // rel | abs | reg
                "cmdPlat": "curr",         // curr | 32 | 64 | both
                "hotKey": "Ctrl+Alt+T",
                "runElevated": false
            },
            { "menuName": "-" },
            {
                "menuName": "Regedit: DP Tracing",
                "cmdLine": "HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\DigitalPersona\\Tracing",
                "cmdWhat": "reg"
            },
            {
                "menuName": "Sysinternals",
                "cmdLine": "https://learn.microsoft.com/sysinternals/",
                "cmdWhat": "abs"
            }
        ]
    }
}

See tools/tools.md for the complete field reference.

init.json — Application options

Stored at %AppData%\traytools-26-go\init.json; normally written by the app itself, but useful to know:

{
    "bounds":  { "x": 100, "y": 100, "width": 1200, "height": 800 },
    "windowSizeKey": "normal",
    "windowSizes": {
        "normal": { "x": 100, "y": 100, "width": 1200, "height": 800 },
        "mini":   { "x": 100, "y": 100, "width": 480,  "height": 72 }
    },
    "runElevated": false,
    "quitOnClose": false,
    "showInTaskbar": true,
    "unloadHookHotkey": "",
    "zoomLevel": 0
}

windowSizeKey / windowSizes — the active size mode (normal or the mini toolbar strip) and the remembered geometry of each.
runElevated — relaunch as administrator on startup.
quitOnClose / showInTaskbar — tray and close-button behavior.
UI preferences (theme, always-on-top, panel layout, tab visibility) are stored separately in the WebView local storage under the traytools-26__v1.0 key.

Building the project

Prerequisites

Tool	Version
Go	1.22+
Wails CLI	v2.12 (`go install github.com/wailsapp/wails/v2/cmd/wails@latest`, or run scripts/install-wails-cli.sh)
Node.js + pnpm	any recent LTS
Windows WebView2 Runtime	preinstalled on Windows 10/11

Live development

From the project root:

wails dev

This starts the Go backend with hot reload and the Vite dev server for the frontend (the scripts in wails.json use pnpm). You can also run the frontend standalone in a browser:

cd frontend
pnpm install
pnpm dev        # http://localhost:34115

Production build

wails build

or the packaged script scripts/build-windows.sh:

wails build --clean --platform windows/amd64 -debug -devtools -ldflags "-H windowsgui"

The redistributable binary is produced at build/bin/traytools-26.exe — a single self-contained executable with the frontend assets embedded. Sample configurations from the tools/ folder can be placed next to the executable (see Where the files are loaded from).

Additional information

Platform: Windows only. The app relies on Windows-specific APIs throughout: the registry, HWND window enumeration, input-state monitoring, UAC elevation/integrity levels, the system tray, and the WebView2 runtime.
Tech stack: Go 1.22 + Wails v2.12 on the backend; React 19, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS 4, shadcn/ui, and Jotai on the frontend.
Config location: %AppData%\traytools-26-go\ (init.json, tools\*.json).
Sample configs: the tools folder contains working copy.json, sync.json, registry.json, tools.json, and a .reg example, plus the Tools-menu format reference.
Hero image: the banner at the top is a single self-contained SVG (2026,08.10.26_1_hero_welcome.svg) with a transparent background — its text and frames adapt to the viewer's light/dark theme via prefers-color-scheme, and the screenshots are embedded as scaled base64 copies (external image links would be blocked by GitHub's CSP). Regenerate it after updating the screenshots with powershell -File scripts/build-hero-image.ps1.
Author: Max Zakharzhevskiy (maxzz@msn.com).

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
.cursor		.cursor
.vscode		.vscode
backend		backend
build		build
frontend		frontend
scripts		scripts
tools		tools
.gitignore		.gitignore
README.md		README.md
README_grok45.md		README_grok45.md
go.mod		go.mod
go.sum		go.sum
main.go		main.go
package.json		package.json
wails.json		wails.json

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Repository files navigation

Table of Contents

Introduction

Screenshots

Features in detail

Copy Operations

Folder Sync

Registry Editor

Tools Menu

WinSpy

Active Monitor

Trace Bits

Process launching and tracking

Window behavior: always-on-top and two sizes

Elevation: raise or drop privileges

Dark and light themes

System tray

JSON formats

Where the files are loaded from

copy.json — Copy Operations

sync.json — Folder Sync

registry.json — Registry Editor

tools.json — Tools Menu (JSONC)

init.json — Application options

Building the project

Prerequisites

Live development

Production build

Additional information

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Screenshots

Features in detail

Copy Operations

Folder Sync

Registry Editor

Tools Menu

WinSpy

Active Monitor

Trace Bits

Process launching and tracking

Window behavior: always-on-top and two sizes

Elevation: raise or drop privileges

Dark and light themes

System tray

JSON formats

Where the files are loaded from

copy.json — Copy Operations

sync.json — Folder Sync

registry.json — Registry Editor

tools.json — Tools Menu (JSONC)

init.json — Application options

Building the project

Prerequisites

Live development

Production build

Additional information

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