Trance

Trance is an open-source desktop focus companion built for Windows using Electron, React, and TypeScript. It utilizes OS-level idle timers to provide activity-aware attention feedback.

It runs as a small always-on-top widget in the corner of your screen, quietly watching your activity signals while you work and letting you know the moment your attention begins to leave the task. The interface is deliberately quiet: near-black surfaces, white type, Inter, and task colors that appear only when they mean something.

Highlights

• Activity-aware widget (src/components/CornerWidget.tsx) - a 300x190 always-on-top React widget that watches input recency and cursor movement, and walks through focused / warning / unfocused states as your attention drifts. Sessions, tasks, and breaks are one click away.
• OS-level idle detection (electron/tracker.ts) - interfaces with Windows idle APIs and foreground-window signals from the Electron main process. No screen reading, no keystroke logging; video detection uses window titles only.
• Analysis dashboard (src/components/Dashboard.tsx) - a recharts-based analytics window: efficiency timelines, insights, and long-term trends with a 3-session moving average, computed and rendered entirely from local data.
• Local-first storage (electron/store.ts) - sessions persist to a local JSON store. Nothing leaves the machine.
• Open-source website (site-b/) - a dependency-free static site built with vanilla JS and hand-drawn SVG charts, deployable to GitHub Pages.

Tech stack

Getting started

npm install
npm run dev            # Vite dev server
npm run electron:dev   # full Electron app with hot reload
npm run electron:build # builds the Windows NSIS installer

Requires Node 18+ and Windows 10/11.

Project structure

├── electron/           # main process: tracker, store, preload bridge
├── src/                # React renderer: widget, dashboard, onboarding, ML
├── scripts/            # icon generation
├── site-b/             # the static promotional website (GitHub Pages)
└── public/             # static assets (app icon)

Privacy

Trance is fully local. Activity signals are processed in memory, sessions are stored in a local JSON file, and no telemetry, accounts, or network calls are involved. See the privacy policy in public/privacy-policy.html.

License

MIT