Tired of Your Calendar Disappearing on Windows? I Built a Pinnable Desktop Calendar in Rust

#rust #calender #productivity #showdev

Introduction

You know the situation. You're in a meeting, trying to schedule a follow-up. "How about the third Friday of next month?" Someone asks.

You need a calendar, fast. The default Windows calendar vanishes the second you click on another window. Firing up Outlook or Google Calendar feels like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut—it's slow, cluttered with events, and just overkill when all you need is to see the date and day of the week.

This small but constant frustration led me to build Feather Calendar: a simple, lightweight desktop calendar for Windows that you can pin to stay on top of your work.

Features

🚀 Zero-Install: Just unzip and run the .exe. No installation, no registry mess.
📌 Always-on-Top (Pinnable): A single click keeps it in front of all other windows, so it's there when you need it.
📅 Intuitive 3-Month View: See the previous, current, and next month at a glance, making cross-month scheduling a breeze.
🎨 Simple Highlighting: Click any date to give it a color highlight. Use it as a temporary marker or a simple reminder.
🌗 Automatic Theme-Sync: Automatically switches between light and dark themes to match your OS settings.
💨 Lightweight & Fast: Built with Rust and the immediate-mode GUI library egui. It has a tiny memory footprint and runs smoothly on any machine.

How to Use

Download the latest .zip file from the Releases Page.
Extract the zip file to any location you like.
Run Feather-Calendar.exe. That's it!

Why I Built This

I wanted a tool for "just checking the date," and I found existing solutions didn't quite fit. Here’s a comparison to show where Feather Calendar fits in:

Feature	Feather Calendar	Windows Default	Google Calendar (Web)	Outlook (Desktop)	Rainlendar (3rd Party)
Installation	✅ (Portable)	✅ (OS Integrated)	✅ (Web)	❌ (Required)	🤔 (Installer/Zip)
Startup/Footprint	✅ (Excellent)	👍 (Good)	🤔 (Browser-dependent)	❌ (Heavy)	🤔 (Varies)
Always-on-Top	✅	❌	❌	❌	👍
Stays Visible	✅	❌	👍 (Tab/Window)	👍 (Window)	👍 (Window)
Multi-Month View	✅ (3 Months)	❌ (1 Month)	👍	👍	👍
Event Scheduling	❌ (By Design)	👍	✅	✅	✅
Customization	❌	❌	🤔	🤔	✅
License	MIT (OSS)	Proprietary	Free (Ad-based)	Paid/Subscription	Free/Pro

As you can see, most existing tools are built around scheduling and event management.

Windows Default Calendar: Handy, but disappears instantly.
Google Calendar / Outlook: Powerful schedulers, but too heavyweight for a quick glance.
Third-party apps: Often feature-rich, but can be resource-intensive and require installation.

Feather Calendar takes the opposite approach. It intentionally omits all scheduling features to excel at one thing: providing a fast, persistent, and unobtrusive way to view the calendar.

Use Cases

Quickly finding a date during a video conference or online class.
Keeping a calendar permanently visible on a secondary monitor.
A quick date/day reference for developers without leaving their IDE for long.
For anyone who feels that tiny bit of frustration when the OS calendar disappears.
A quick, offline calendar reference when you don't want to open a browser.

Tech Stack & Acknowledgements

This tool was made possible by these fantastic open-source projects:

Rust: The best-in-class language for creating fast, reliable, and safe software.
egui: An immediate-mode GUI library for Rust that makes building clean, fast, and cross-platform UIs incredibly simple. Its official wrapper, eframe, handled all the windowing boilerplate.
chrono: The de-facto standard for date and time handling in Rust.

A huge thank you to all the contributors who develop and maintain these amazing tools.

To Finish Up

While there are plenty of powerful calendar apps out there, Feather Calendar aims to be the opposite. It’s a small utility that focuses on doing one thing well.

If you've ever been annoyed by your existing calendar workflow, I'd love for you to give it a try. Any feedback or suggestions are welcome on the GitHub issues page!