cursor-lang
The WPF application displays the keyboard layout at the cursor.
Cloning
Binary assets — the exe icon and the MSIX logos — are stored in Git LFS, so git-lfs has to be installed before cloning:
git lfs install
git clone git@git.alrakis.kz:alrakis/cursor-lang.git
Cloning without it succeeds but leaves text pointer files in place of the
images, and the build then fails on an unreadable icon. An existing clone is
repaired with git lfs install followed by git lfs pull.
Running it while working on it
dotnet run --project CursorLang.Agent
That is the whole application, not just the background half: building the agent puts the settings window next to it, because that is where the agent looks for it — the tray menu starts it by path, and an installation has the two in one folder. Build the agent alone and the Settings item would silently do nothing.
Rider and Visual Studio pick the launch profiles up from
CursorLang.Agent/Properties/launchSettings.json and
CursorLang.Settings/Properties/launchSettings.json, so the run configuration
dropdown offers three:
| Profile | What it does |
|---|---|
Agent |
The user's launch: tray icon and the settings window straight away |
Agent (started by Windows) |
Adds --startup: tray only, no window — the sign-in case |
Settings |
The settings window on its own, with no agent behind it |
Both halves read %APPDATA%\CursorLang\settings.json, the same file the installed
application uses — there is one code path resolving it and both call it. Debugging
therefore edits the real settings; that is deliberate, since watching the agent pick
up a change made in the window is most of what there is to watch.
To step through both at once, turn on attaching to child processes in the debugger: the settings window is started by the agent as a separate process, and without that the debugger stays with the agent.
Administrator rights
The app runs as the ordinary user. Elevation was dropped so that the app can be published in the Microsoft Store: MSIX packages always run in the context of the signed-in user, and Store policy rejects apps that need administrator rights for any part of their functionality.
The cost is the optional Caps Lock hotkey. While a window of a higher integrity level holds the focus — Task Manager, Registry Editor, UAC prompts — Windows neither delivers keystrokes to the low-level hook nor accepts the layout change request, so the hotkey does nothing there. Reading the layout of a foreign window is not restricted, so the tooltip itself keeps working everywhere.
Two processes
The app is two executables sharing one folder.
CursorLang.exe is the agent: the keyboard hook, the layout polling, the tooltip
and the tray icon. It is what Windows starts at sign-in and what sits in the tray
all day, so it is built without WPF — a background process that carries the
rendering stack costs around a hundred megabytes for a tooltip it draws with Win32
in eight. It holds under 9 MB instead.
CursorLang.Settings.exe is the settings window, and nothing else. The agent
starts it from the tray menu; closing the window ends the process, and the memory
WPF took goes back to the system. The price is a cold start of half a second or so
the next time the window is asked for.
CursorLang.Core.dll is what both hold in common: the models, the settings file,
the layout tracking, the updates. No UI, and it must stay that way — whatever lands
there lands in the background process.
The connection between the two is settings.json and nothing else. The window
writes it — whole, into a temporary file moved into place in one step — and then
posts a registered window message to the agent, which re-reads. The message carries
no data: sending the changed values along would make the file stop being the only
source of truth. An agent that is not running is a normal case — the window works the
same. Nobody watches the file: it has one writer, and that writer speaks up.
The tray
The settings window is a guest on the screen rather than the app itself: it shows up after the installation and whenever the icon or its menu is asked for. Both buttons in its title bar mean what they say — the window closes and its process ends. The way out of the app itself is the Exit item of the tray menu.
The menu of the icon is a system one, drawn by Windows. Its captions still follow the language chosen in the settings, but the theme no longer reaches it: a WPF menu would mean the whole rendering stack in the background process, which is the one thing that process is built to avoid.
Started by Windows itself, the app shows no window at all and goes straight to the
tray — the user asked for it to be there when they sign in, not for a window to
greet them every morning. The two builds tell such a launch apart differently: the
registry entry of an unpacked build carries the --startup argument, while a
package has no say in its command line, and Windows is asked about the activation
instead.
Should Windows refuse the icon — there is no notification area in a session without a desktop — the agent opens the settings window whatever the launch was. The alternative would be an app the user can neither see nor quit.
Startup
Startup is switched on from the app's settings by whichever means the build has.
A package declares it in the manifest as a windows.startupTask. A build unpacked
into a folder registers itself the way desktop programs always have — under
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, which needs no administrator
rights. The command names CursorLang.exe — the agent, not the settings window
the checkbox was clicked in — and ends with --startup: that is how the agent
tells a launch of Windows' own doing from a launch by the user.
Either way Windows lists the app in Settings — Apps — Startup; if the user turns
it off there, the app can no longer turn it back on and says so instead of
silently failing. The registry entry stays where it is in that case: Windows keeps
the user's verdict apart from it, under StartupApproved, and the app obeys it.
Settings
Where settings.json lives depends on how the app was installed. A separate
install keeps it in %APPDATA%\CursorLang. The packaged build keeps it in the
package's own data folder, which Windows removes together with the app — Store
apps are expected to leave nothing behind.
On its first run the packaged build picks up the settings left by a separate install and copies them over. The original file stays where it is: both builds may be installed side by side, and the app has no business deleting settings it does not own.
Updates
The check runs when the settings window is opened, not when the machine is switched on: the background half no longer goes to the network at all, and there would be nothing in it to show the answer. The setting in the window says as much.
The app looks for new versions among the releases of its own repository. A
release counts when its tag is a plain version — v1.2.3 or 1.2.3 — and an
MSIX package is attached to it. A tag with anything else in it, v1.2.3-beta
among them, is passed over: a pre-release version is asked for on purpose, not
offered by the app.
Out of the attached files the .msixbundle is preferred — it carries both
architectures. Failing that, the package whose name holds the architecture of
this machine is taken: CursorLang-1.2.3.0-x64.msix. Those are the names
build-msix.ps1 produces, so a release is made by attaching what it built.
The package is downloaded to the temp folder and handed to the Windows app installer: it shows the publisher, asks for a confirmation and replaces the installed version. Windows checks the signature, so the package attached to a release has to be signed — an unsigned one installs nowhere but a machine in developer mode. The running app keeps working off the old files until it is restarted.
An app installed from the Store has no updates section at all: the Store updates it, and a package from the side is something Windows would not accept over it anyway.
By itself the app asks about releases once a day, at startup, and remembers the date of the last successful check in the settings. The check can be turned off there, which leaves the button in the settings window doing the same on demand.
Where the releases are looked for is set in UpdateOptions — the repository
belongs to whoever publishes the app, not to the user, so the values live in the
build rather than in settings.json:
services.AddSingleton(new UpdateOptions
{
ServiceUri = new Uri("https://git.alrakis.kz/"), // the Gitea server itself
Project = "alrakis/cursor-lang",
});
The releases come from Gitea, and its API sits on the server itself: the address
is the one the repository is opened at in a browser, and the app asks
/api/v1/repos/{owner}/{repo}/releases under it.
A closed repository needs a token. It is read from the CURSORLANG_UPDATE_TOKEN
environment variable rather than kept in the source: a secret built into the app
is a secret handed to everyone who got the app.
Tests
dotnet test
There is a suite per project — CursorLang.Core.Tests, CursorLang.Agent.Tests
and CursorLang.Settings.Tests — all on xUnit, with the fakes and the helpers in a
library of their own, CursorLang.Tests.Shared. That library knows nothing about
xUnit: the one thing that wanted an assertion says so with an exception instead.
Core's suite carries no WPF reference, which is a check in itself: anything that
would drag WPF into the background process fails to compile there.
Half of the app — windows, timers, the keyboard hook — only works on an STA thread
with a message loop, so the tests keep one such thread for the whole run and drive
everything through it. For Core and the agent that thread runs a plain Win32 loop
(CursorLang.Tests.Shared/Pump.cs); the settings window gets a WPF dispatcher
instead.
A few checks need a real foreground window: the caret position and the layout switch request are only observable there. Windows does not always grant the right to bring a window forward, and those checks report themselves as skipped rather than as failures — there is nothing to verify without a foreground window. The end-to-end checks start the built application as a separate process and skip themselves if the app is already running: interfering with someone else's running instance is not their business.
Coverage is collected with:
dotnet test --collect:"XPlat Code Coverage" --settings coverage.runsettings
What stays uncovered is what a test process cannot reach: the code paths that
require an MSIX package identity — StartupTask and the package data folder —
and the composition roots — App.xaml.cs and Agent.cs — which are exercised
end-to-end instead. One of those end-to-end checks reads the module list of the
running agent and fails if any part of the WPF renderer is in it.
Continuous integration
The pipelines live in .gitea/workflows and run on Gitea Actions. A pull
request into master is built and tested; a tag of the form v1.2.3 is built,
tested, packed into an MSIX and published as a release with the packages
attached. The version is taken from the tag alone — a tag shaped any other way
stops the run right at the start. The package version ends up as 1.2.3.0: the
Store takes four numbers and keeps the last one for itself, so the tag has no
say in it.
Both pipelines ask for a Windows runner labelled windows-x64 with the .NET 10
SDK and git-lfs on it. The checkout pulls LFS files: without them the icon is a
text pointer and the build fails on it. The runner is better off working in an
interactive desktop session: the tests raise real windows, and the checks that
need a desktop of their own — the end-to-end ones, and those that ask for the
foreground window or the caret — skip themselves on a runner that lives as a
service in session 0, where there is no desktop to show a window on.
The package the release carries goes to Partner Center as it is. The identity
comes from repository variables and falls back to the defaults of the script when
unset: MSIX_IDENTITY_NAME, MSIX_PUBLISHER and MSIX_PUBLISHER_DISPLAY_NAME.
Building the MSIX package
Neither Visual Studio nor the Windows SDK is required — makeappx comes from a
NuGet package. The full publishing procedure — from opening a developer account
to submitting for certification — is written up in
Packaging/PUBLISHING.RU.md (Russian only).
# One-off: draw the logos and the exe icon (already committed, rerun after edits)
powershell -File Packaging\New-Assets.ps1
# A check on your own machine: your architecture alone
powershell -File Packaging\build-msix.ps1 -Architectures x64
# For Partner Center — the identity is the one reserved there
powershell -File Packaging\build-msix.ps1 -Version 1.0.1.0 `
-IdentityName 12345AleksandrNeychev.CursorLang -Publisher "CN=ABCD1234-..."
The result is artifacts\packages\CursorLang-<version>.msixbundle covering x64
and arm64; next to it lie the packages of single architectures. Upload the bundle
to Partner Center as it is.
The app ships with its own copy of .NET: Windows does not include .NET 10, and MSIX cannot install a runtime as a package dependency.
To try the package without installing it, register the published layout — this needs Developer Mode and no signature at all:
Add-AppxPackage -Register artifacts\layout\x64\AppxManifest.xml
Remove-AppxPackage (Get-AppxPackage -Name CursorLang).PackageFullName