Coming SoonFree editionDesktop & dev workflow

Desktop Keeper

The desktop stays the way you left it: icon layouts saved per monitor arrangement and restored the instant a screen is plugged in or unplugged, window layouts and zones you can recall by name, a dock and launcher for the things you open daily, icons that hide themselves when you are working and return on a hover, and world clocks for the people you work with.

Notify me All products

The problem

Unplug a laptop from its monitor and every desktop icon piles into the corner; plug it back in and they stay there. Windows has never fixed it, so DesktopOK, a one-man freeware from 2007, is still among the most downloaded programs on the planet. Window layouts are the same story: FancyZones snaps windows but cannot save and recall a working set, docks are abandoned shareware, and nobody's auto-hide, clock and launcher agree with each other.

Features

Icon layouts keyed to the monitor arrangement (which screens, resolution, scaling, orientation) and restored automatically within a second of a display change, with named layouts for home, office and laptop-only, history and undo
Window layouts: save every open window's position, size and monitor as a named set, recall it with a hotkey, and zones for dragging windows into place, aware of scaling and virtual desktops
Dock and launcher: pinned apps, folders, documents and suite utilities, with search-as-you-type over everything on the PC through the Search engine, portable settings
Desktop auto-hide after a chosen idle time or when a full-screen app runs, back on a hover or a corner; world clocks, a desktop ruler and colour picker as lightweight widgets with one settings page
Per-user profiles and a roaming file so the same desktop follows you to the next PC with PC Move Assistant

How it works

Icon layouts

Reads and writes icon positions through the desktop list-view with the undocumented but long-stable shell interfaces DesktopOK uses, with a fallback to the registry stream
Display-change detection via WM_DISPLAYCHANGE and the display configuration API; the layout key is the full topology

Windows and zones

Window enumeration with monitor and DPI awareness; restore by window class and title, tolerant of apps that recreate their windows
Zones drawn per monitor, with keyboard moves

Who it is for

Consultant

Laptop to dock, ten times a day

Three layouts (desk, meeting room, train) restore themselves on every display change; no corner pile-ups since.

Analyst

The trading desk

A nine-window layout across three monitors returns with one hotkey every morning.

Benefits

Icons back in place the moment a monitor is plugged in
Named window layouts recalled by hotkey
One dock, launcher and widget set that agree

Built to be trusted

Every restore is undoable; layouts are versioned
Nothing hooks into other processes
Settings portable and roaming

Good to know

Icon positions use shell interfaces that Microsoft does not document; they have been stable for twenty years and DesktopOK relies on the same ones, but a Windows update could change them and the fallback is slower. Some apps (Electron, games) ignore window placement requests on restore. Zones are a convenience, not a replacement for PowerToys if you already live in FancyZones.

Under the hood

For technical readers

Shell desktop list-view and icon streams
Display configuration API
Window and virtual desktop APIs
Search engine; Jobs

Works well with

Coming SoonFree edition

Capture Studio

Desktop & dev workflow

Screen capture built for the loop: see it, capture it, paste it into Claude Code in VS Code, with the file path and the image both on the clipboard.

Coming SoonFree edition

Public Wi-Fi Guard

Internet & connections

Safe on hotel, airport, café and conference Wi-Fi.

ReadyFree edition

Copy Engine

Files & transfer

Unbuffered, journaled, verified copying that survives disconnects and tells the truth about progress.

Coming Soon

Notify me when Desktop Keeper is ready

Desktop Keeper is planned for a later release. Leave your e-mail address and we will write once when it becomes available. We ask you to confirm your address first, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Questions now? Contact our team.