Inside the stack, not on top of it
Most wallpaper tools park a borderless window behind your icons and hope nothing notices. FeatherWall inserts a real visual into the desktop's own composition tree, which is why your icons, your right-click menu and your window ordering all keep behaving normally.
24H2 changed the rules
Windows 11 24H2 raised the desktop out of reach of the old WorkerW child-window trick, which is why a lot of wallpaper tools started rendering a black screen. FeatherWall detects the topology at runtime and handles both layouts.
One process, no shell
Direct3D 11 and DirectComposition, called from C# through Vortice. There is no Chromium, no Electron and no separate launcher sitting in the background.
It gets out of the way
Playback stops rather than throttles for fullscreen apps, the lock screen, remote sessions and battery saver. A game never competes with your wallpaper for the GPU.
What it actually costs
Sampled over 30 to 40 second windows on a running instance. Windows 11 Pro build 26200, 24 logical cores, 2560×1600 at 150% scaling. Bars show working set.
A paused video costs less CPU than a still image because the still one is still redrawing its clock every second. Nothing here is a projection: these are numbers off a running process, and the method is in the repository if you want to disagree with it.
Any font you own
Nine positions, any installed typeface, adjustable size, colour and opacity. The settings panel previews it with the same renderer that paints your desktop, so what you pick is what lands.
Get it, check it, or build it
Releases are unsigned, so SmartScreen will warn you the first time. Verify the archive against the published hash, or skip the binary entirely and build it yourself.
Download Fastest
Unzip anywhere and run FeatherWall.exe. It lives in the tray.
Get the ZIP 7.5 MBSHA-256
300f59a28269fc2fc034ad86ee64d6fd320cd17f8c2e7a31c789bcc28844dfd7
Verify Then
Check what you downloaded before you run it. PowerShell, no extra tools.
Should match the hash on the left, character for character.
Build it Or, instead
Needs the .NET 10 SDK. About a minute on a cold clone.
Run dotnet test first if you want to check the suite yourself.
A winget package is submitted and waiting on review at microsoft/winget-pkgs#417753. Until a maintainer merges it, winget install FeatherWall will not find anything, so it is not listed above.
Five things need doing
This was built by one person on one monitor. Several code paths are written and unit-tested but have never run on real hardware, and no amount of testing on my machine will change that. Every issue below is open and labelled.
- #3Verify multi-monitor behaviour on real hardwarehelp wantedhardware needed
- #4Verify the classic WorkerW desktop topology on Windows 10help wantedhardware needed
- #5Verify recovery after an explorer.exe restartgood first issue
- #6Gallery: several entries are below the resolution of the displays they targethelp wantedgood first issue
- #1Pin SHA-1 checksums for the three unpinned NASA gallery videosgood first issue
Who made this
I'm Ritvik Dayal, a software engineer. I build things from scratch to understand how they work, which is how this started: I wanted a live wallpaper and did not want a launcher, an account, or a browser engine running behind my desktop.
MIT licensed, no paid tier, nothing to upsell.
- Runtime
- .NET 10
- Graphics
- D3D11 / DComp
- Released
- 15 Aug 2026
- Author
- @RitvikDayal