Down the right edge of Desktop Minder is a strip of tabs, and each tab slides a panel out beside it. Unlike the launcher panes on the left, which belong to one desktop, these belong to the whole program: whichever desktop you're on, you're borrowing the same Properties, the same Jukebox, the same Calculator and the same Claude, plus whatever plug-ins you've switched on. This page says how to open, size and arrange the panels, and what each one is for.

Opening and Arranging Panels

Opening and Closing

Click a tab and its panel slides out; click the same tab again and the panel goes away, leaving the bare strip so the View gets its room back. Clicking a different tab swaps one panel for another. Which panels are open is remembered, so the strip comes back the way you left it.

• Ctrl-click a tab to add its panel to the ones already open, or take it out again, so two panels sit side by side. Each is narrower than it would be alone.
• Shift-click opens every panel from the last one you clicked to this one.
• Carrying something—a track, say, on its way to the Jukebox—over a closed tab for a moment opens that panel without dropping what you're holding, so you can let go inside it. It's added to whatever is open, so the panel you started from stays put.

Width and Order

Drag the inner edge of an open panel to make it wider or narrower. The width is one setting for the whole strip, remembered from one session to the next, along with which panels are open, so switching desktops doesn't change any of it. A panel that can't work narrower than some width (Claude and the Calculator are the two) opens the strip that wide for as long as it's open, and the strip goes back to the width you chose when it's put away.

Drag a tab up or down to move it. Let go in the empty space below the others and it settles at the bottom of the strip, where it stays out of the way of the ones you use most.

Putting a Tab Away

A panel you never use doesn't have to sit on the strip. Right-click the strip, or any tab on it, and you get the list of Side Tabs, each with a tick where it is showing. Untick one and its tab disappears; because the bare strip has the same menu, you can tick it back later without hunting. The same list is on a desktop's own settings sheet.

The Panels

Properties

Properties describes whatever you last clicked: a file or folder in a launcher pane or a listing, or the document open in the View. Right-click anything and choose Properties, and this panel slides out and shows it. It is not Explorer's dialog, and it stays open while you click around, rebuilding itself for each new thing. With nothing selected, it says so.

Properties holds what's true behind the scenes: size, dates, what a file is made of. What you choose to say about a file is a tag, and that's edited on its own sheet (see Edit Tags on the Audio page). A few tags, a film's among them, can be changed here, as described below.

At the top is the item's icon, its name and what kind of thing it is. Below that come sections that fold open and shut. A new subject starts with its sections shut, because you clicked to find out what it is, not to read every fact at once; the exceptions are Storage, which stays open if you had it open, and the one section you most likely came for, such as a film's tags. Which sections appear depends on what's selected.

• Storage, for anything: Name, Type, Location, Size, and the dates it was Created, Modified and Accessed. A file shows its size both ways, what it holds and what it takes up on the disk. A folder shows a Calculate Size button instead, because adding up a folder means walking all of it, and that is slow on a network drive; press it when you want the answer. A drive adds Used, Free, Capacity and File system, with a ring that shows how full it is. Something only the shell knows about, such as a phone, shows just its name and type.
• Handling, how Windows treats the thing: ticks for Read-only, Hidden and System, which you can change here, and Indexed, whether Search looks inside it. A file that came from another computer also has Blocked, which you can clear (and cannot set again). On a folder, Read-only and System don't mean what they say; Windows sets both on any folder with its own icon, and the panel says so under the ticks. A drive's root shows only Indexed.
• Folder, for a folder: Contains (what's directly in it, in folders and files), Custom icon and Settings, which says whether the folder keeps its own columns and sort in a file of its own. These fill in a moment after the panel does, so a slow drive never holds it up. A mailbox or one of its baskets adds a Mailbox section; a music library adds Library (artists, albums, tracks, when it was scanned); the contact book adds Contacts.
• Application, for a program or a shortcut to one: Product, Description, Version, Company, Copyright, its size and date, and for a shortcut, the Arguments and Start in folder it runs with. If the program has moved, the section says "Not there" rather than leaving you to guess. A shortcut to anything else gets a section named for what it points at.
• The kind's own facts. A recording shows Track, Title, Artist, Album, Year, Genre, Length, Bit rate and so on; a picture, its Size in pixels and its Format; a MIDI score, the performer and SoundFonts that play it; a text file, its Words, Lines and Characters; a web page, its Address; a message, who it's From and To and, under Delivery, where it Arrived from and what the receiving server made of it; a contact, the card; a Word document, its own properties.

Select several things and the panel says N items selected, shows (various) where they differ, and offers Calculate Combined Size. A tick shows a third, in-between state when the things selected disagree with each other.

Changing things here. A row that can be changed looks like any other until you click it. Then type, pick or choose a color, and press Enter (or just click away) to keep it; Esc puts it back. If the change can't be made, the reason appears under the row and the old value stays. The tick rows work the same way, a click at a time. The main thing you can type here is a film's tags: Title, Director, Artist, Series, Episode, Year and Genre, shown even when empty, because the ones a film hasn't been given are the ones you're here to fill in. Clear a row and you clear the tag. They're written into the file at once. The panel also shows Length, Last watched and Resume at. If a film's tags can't be changed (it's read-only, it's still empty, or it's the film a video makes, whose tags are set in the video), the panel says why under the first of them. The Comment tag isn't in the panel; that's on the tag sheet.

When you're editing a video, the panel is about the video: its tags (open on arrival), Width, Height, Frame rate, Other frame rates, Background and Layers, and each change is a step that Undo takes back. Choose a moment or two in the video and the panel describes those instead. For a recording you're editing, it shows the Input the next recording will come from (a microphone, or what a playback device is playing), its length, Sample rate and Channels. The Video and Audio pages say more about each.

Jukebox

The Jukebox panel is the one music player and its queue. Anything that plays music, anywhere in the program, feeds it: right-click a track, album or folder and choose Play, then Now, Next or Last; or drag music into the panel, from a pane, a listing or File Explorer. An arrow beside its picture opens the player in the View, with the queue staying in the strip. Only one thing sounds at a time, so a film, or a clip in the Wikipedia panel, pauses it. The Audio page has all the rest: the queue, shuffle and repeat, joining songs, volume leveling and what's remembered.

Calculator

Calculator is Windows' own Calculator, not a copy of it, so every mode it has is there (Standard, Scientific, Graphing, Programmer, Date calculation, the converters) and whatever Windows adds to it later arrives by itself. It is started the first time you open the panel and kept running after that, so its history and mode are still there next time. It's shown while the panel is open and hidden when it's put away.

Some of Calculator's modes are wider than the panel; when you switch to one, the strip widens to fit it. If you close Calculator with its own close button, it starts again the next time the panel is opened. It's closed when Desktop Minder is, because Desktop Minder started it. If it can't be found or started, the panel says "Calculator did not open."

Claude

Claude is the Claude app, the real one and unchanged, with your own conversations in it. There is only ever one copy: if Claude is already running, that's the window Desktop Minder uses; if it isn't, Desktop Minder starts it. If Claude isn't installed, the panel says so.

• More room. The arrow beside Claude's name (Open Claude in a View) moves it into the View, on the desktop in front. The panel then says "Claude is open in a View" and offers Bring it back; closing the View, or pressing the arrow there (Return Claude to the slide-out), gives it back to the panel.
• How wide. Claude won't go narrower than 616 pixels nor shorter than 408, so the strip opens that wide for it. Where there isn't that much room, such as a View that's too narrow or two panels side by side, Claude steps out into a window of its own and the panel says why. It is never left hanging over what's around it, and never lost.
• In front. While you're working in Desktop Minder, Claude stays in front of it; when you go to another program, Claude steps back behind that one.
• Leaving. When Desktop Minder closes, Claude is put back as it was and left running, because what you have open in it is yours. If you quit Claude from its own menu, it isn't started again behind your back: the panel shows a Start Claude button.

Adding Panels

More panels come from plug-ins: small add-on programs, each a folder holding a DLL of the same name. Desktop Minder looks for them in a Plugins folder beside the program, which is where the ones that come with it are, and in a Plugins folder under your Apps\Cilwa folder, for your own. Open the Settings sheet from This PC and you'll find the Plug-ins list, a tick for each one found. Tick one to switch it on. Except for an icon theme, which takes effect at once, a plug-in starts the next time Desktop Minder does; one that can't be loaded can't be ticked, and the list says why. Each plug-in has a folder of its own to keep things in, under PlugInData in the same Apps\Cilwa folder.

A plug-in's panel gets a tab on the right-hand strip and behaves like any other, including being put away from the Side Tabs list. Two come with the program: Notes, for quick notes, and Wikipedia, a browser that stays within Wikipedia. The Calculator and Claude are not plug-ins; they are built in, and can only be put away, not removed.

A plug-in is trusted code, as trusted as the program itself, and can't be unloaded while Desktop Minder is running. One that fails to start is left alone, with the reason recorded, and doesn't stop the others or the program.

Not Yet

• Panels on the left-hand strip from a plug-in. Only right-hand panels are hosted so far, and the launcher panes down the left are described on the Desktops page.
• Switching a plug-in on or off without restarting, other than themes.

Notes Plug-in

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/30/2026 Updated: 10/30/2026
Hashtags: #Software #DesktopMinder #Notes #Plugins #StickyNotes #Text #Panels
The Notes plug-in for Desktop Minder: a slide-out of quick notes, each an ordinary file whose first lines show on its tile, with a New Note tile at the top and paste to make a note from the clipboard.
Estimated reading time: 3 minute(s) (611 words)

The Notes plug-in is a slide-out of quick notes, for the thing you need to write down now, before you've decided where it belongs. A note is an ordinary file in a folder of its own, and the panel shows each one with its first few lines, so you can see what you wrote without opening it. The first tile, New Note, makes a new one and opens it for typing; pasting turns whatever is on the clipboard into one.