Hot Corners skin for Rainmeter

[emvaized]

I created a simple Rainmeter skin which implements hot corners functionality on Windows — the same as in MacOS or Linux.

First of all, what's the purpose? There's plenty of standalone Hot corners utility on Windows, such as WinXCorners. But when I explored their source code I figured out they implement hot corners functionality by constantly listening and checking for mouse cursor position. It means, whenever you casually move your mouse on screen, these utilities run dozens or hunders of checks per second to find out if cursor is currently in the corner or not.

There's also few Autohotkey scripts, which are even worse in this regard — they run timers periodically every few milliseconds, which means they do such checks even when you're not moving the cursor at all. I believe modern computers are powerful enough to handle such excessive calculations, but it still might impact performance, battery life and input delay.

This is how I came up with idea of this HotCorners skin, which is devoid of all this disadvantage. All it does is simply shows small overlays in each corner, and runs VBS scripts once they get hovered with mouse cursor. Theoretically it should lead to zero impact on performance and battery life.

Also, idea of implementing hot corners in Rainmeter has other advantages. It means one less program in your system tray, one less program on startup, etc. It will also follow Rainmeter's game mode, so one less program to handle in-game behavior and to manage blacklists.

Skin includes few VBS scripts for most common actions, which I found in Google. You could edit them to fit your needs with any text editor, or use your own VBS scripts.

To edit corners change HotCorners.ini file. I disabled top-right corner by default, as it iterfers with window close button — to enable remove semicolor (;) before [TopRightCorner]


Notes:
- Included VBS scripts which send keyboard hotkeys (such as "ShowDesktop" script, which sebds Win+D hotkey) result in NumLock popup notification every time for me on Windows 11. You may like to use Autohotkey scripts instead
- Overlays may get covered by other widgets or overlays, resulting in hot corners not functioning. Make sure to toggle "Keep above" setting in skin's settings, and to not cover skin overlays with any other Rainmeter skin (such as Rounded Screen Corners)
- Enabling this skin seems to result in some programms considering Rainmeter.exe a fullscreen window. Hence, when it gets focused, some apps may think you opened fullscreen app, such as game. For me it resulted in WallpaperEngine pausing playback when I minimize all windows, and Rainmeter window gets focused. Adding Rainmeter to exclusions in WallpaperEngine rules solved the issue. It could also help to disable both hot corners on the right size, or move them to a separate skin file
- I haven't tested it on multi-monitor setup

Please feel free to share your thoughts or any ideas on how to improve skin's functionality.