Emerge Desktop is a replacement windows "shell" (the desktop environment normally provided by Windows Explorer) for Windows XP and above. In order to replace Windows Explorer as a shell, it provides a system tray (the area that collects the icons collected at the lower right corner in Explorer), called emergeTray. It will also provide access to the users programs (normally accessed with the windows "start" button) via a right-click on the desktop, via emergeCore.

Emerge Desktop is implemented with MinGW (MinGW-w64 for the 64-bit version), an OpenSource implementation of the GNU C compiler and utilities. Up to this point, closed source commercial projects have mainly been used (Microsoft Visual C++, Borland Delphi) to develop alternate shells as they use proprietary Microsoft API features. With Microsoft releasing more detailed information about these API calls, the MinGW win32api is now quite complete. Additionally, several web sites on the internet have started to include documentation and code that illustrate how to access and use these functions.

Emerge Desktop has an open API, which allows for applets to be coded with compilers other than MinGW if someone wishes to do so.

Emerge Desktop is written in C++ and is licensed as OpenSource (under the GPL). All the source is available in Mercurial at Sourceforge. Emerge Desktop can be developed using Code::Blocks, which is an IDEs for MinGW.

From a design point of view, Emerge Desktop applets are capable of being run as both standalone as well as being integrated. In order for Emerge Desktop applets to communicate with each other, emergeCore must be running. Without emergeCore, each applet will run independently (if, for example, you wish to use them in conjunction with another desktop shell).

If you want to participate in this project there are forums and an irc channel (#emergedesktop) on FreeNode. Please feel free to try Emerge Desktop, and provide feedback!

Latest Forum Posts:

Topic: Is Recent History/Documents in Emerge?
By: MeToo
On: Fri Jan 27, 2012 6:25 pm

Topic: Releases
By: ironhead
On: Fri Jan 27, 2012 3:37 pm

Topic: Development Release: 6.0.0.1023
By: ironhead
On: Fri Jan 27, 2012 3:35 pm

Topic: Crash Report for emergetray
By: ironhead
On: Thu Jan 26, 2012 11:52 pm

Topic: Icons larger than 32x32 & 16x16 for Task & Tray?
By: MeToo
On: Thu Jan 26, 2012 5:16 pm

Topic: Citrix online plugin WEB
By: aetherspoon
On: Thu Jan 26, 2012 3:53 am

Topic: Stay topmost
By: ironhead
On: Wed Jan 25, 2012 12:50 pm

Topic: Blank desktop at install
By: Xaero
On: Wed Jan 25, 2012 11:52 am

Topic: Nightly Delta Uploads
By: Xaero
On: Tue Jan 24, 2012 11:49 am

Topic: Yahoo messenger help with emerge desktop
By: kevinjose356
On: Sun Jan 22, 2012 2:52 am