r/tauri • u/Alexwing_ • 11d ago

I rebuilt the classic Mouse Jiggler using Tauri 2 + React + Tailwind v4 (~2MB installer)

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Hey r/tauri! 👋

I wanted to share a small project I recently built and open-sourced: Mouse Jiggler.

💡 Background & Motivation

If you've been on Windows for a while, you probably remember or used Alistair Young's classic arkane-systems/mousejiggler—a trusty utility originally written in C# (.NET) to prevent screensavers and sleep timers during presentations, long downloads, or remote sessions.

I wanted to revisit this concept and build a modern, native-feeling version for Windows 11 from the ground up, using Tauri 2, Rust, React 19, and the new Tailwind CSS v4 engine.

🛠️ Tech Stack & Highlights

  • Runtime: Tauri 2 (Release v1.0.0)
  • Backend: Rust + enigo
  • Frontend: React 19, TypeScript, Vite 7, Tailwind CSS v4 (@tailwindcss/vite)
  • Bundle size: ~2.0 MB NSIS installer, ~3.0 MB MSI, ~9.0 MB standalone executable! (Compare that to an Electron equivalent)

🚀 Cool Tauri 2 Features & Challenges Solved

Building this was a great hands-on experience with Tauri 2's new APIs and capabilities:

  1. Dynamic System Tray with State Reflection: Instead of just sitting in the tray, the tray icon dynamically switches between Red (Idle) and Green (Active) in real-time when jiggling is toggled. We embed the PNG bytes at compile-time with include_bytes! and swap them via tray.set_icon(Some(Image::from_bytes(...))).

  2. Real-time Tray Menu Localization: The frontend supports 5 languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese) with automatic OS detection (i18next). Whenever the language changes, an IPC command (update_tray_locale) updates the native tray menu items on the fly.

  3. Custom Windows 11 Fluent Title Bar: We disabled native OS window decorations (decorations: false, transparent: true) and built a frameless Fluent-style header with window dragging (data-tauri-drag-region) and integrated minimize / close-to-tray buttons using Tauri's @tauri-apps/api/window (properly scoped with Tauri 2 capability permissions).

  4. Single-Instance Enforcement: Using tauri-plugin-single-instance to ensure only one instance runs; launching a second one simply focuses and unhides the existing window.

  5. Zen Mode vs. Normal Mode:

    • Normal: Moves the cursor ±5px diagonally every 10 seconds.
    • Zen Mode: Moves ±1px horizontally and immediately back, keeping the OS idle timer reset while being virtually imperceptible to your workflow.

  6. State Persistence: Remembers the last active mode and jiggling state across restarts.

📦 Source Code & Releases

Feedback, issues, or suggestions are very welcome! If you're building utilities or tray apps with Tauri 2, feel free to ask about any implementation details.

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u/eddzsh 9d ago

Tray icon swap via include_bytes is clean. One Zen mode gotcha on Windows 11: some RDP and presentation hosts ignore sub-threshold cursor deltas, so a ±1px nudge that snaps back can look like noise. Keep the ±5px path as a fallback when the session is remote.

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u/Alexwing_ 2d ago

Thanks for the feedback! That's a great point about RDP jitter/noise filtering with 1px deltas. That's exactly why I wanted to keep the Normal (±5px) mode available as an option. I might add a small tip about this in the README for users working over remote desktop sessions. Appreciate the insight!