Show Mode for Windows
Stops your show PC embarrassing you mid-show (preview)
What it does
Show PCs fail in the same small, embarrassing ways as show Macs, plus a few of their own. The display sleeps during a long hold, a notification lands on the LED wall, the projector becomes the main display and takes the taskbar with it, or Outlook chimes through the PA. Show Mode turns that lot off with one click in the notification area (or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F11), and puts it all back with another.
It's a separate app from Show Mode for the Mac, not a port: Windows needed different answers to nearly every question. Nothing in it needs admin. Do Not Disturb goes through the same part of Windows that Settings uses, and a laptop driving a projector gets a temporary copy of its power plan with the lid set to do nothing, so your own plan is never edited.
Putting things back is the important half. Before Show Mode changes anything it writes down what was there, and at the end it only undoes its own changes. If it crashes or the PC restarts mid-show, the next launch finds its notes and tidies up. Windows remembers a per-app mute even after the app that set it has gone, so a small watchdog unmutes everything the moment Show Mode does.
- Prevents display and system sleep with a power request that goes with the app, so a crash can't leave a PC that never sleeps
- Switches to a temporary copy of your power plan with the lid set to do nothing, no sleep timeouts and Energy saver off, and deletes it afterwards
- Turns on Do Not Disturb, and turns off system sounds, the screen saver, Snap, AutoPlay, the taskbar's Show Desktop corner and Windows' app-crash dialogs
- Blocks the Windows key and anything pressed with it, Ctrl+Esc and Print Screen, and the accessibility shortcuts that put a box over the show
- Keeps the cursor off the screens you tick, stopping it dead at their edge, with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F10 to pause it. It never leaves the cursor nowhere to go
- Blacks out the wallpaper on every screen, including one plugged in mid-show, and puts the pictures, their position and a slideshow back afterwards. Windows Spotlight is left alone, since it can't be put back exactly
- Keeps the main display main and splits a screen that starts mirroring mid-show back out to extended, without saving anything to Windows' own display memory, and lets go of a layout something else keeps reverting
- Quits f.lux and LightBulb and opens them again afterwards, pauses Syncthing's syncing folders, and can quit sync apps for the show (off by default)
- Mutes every app not allowed to play, sound already playing included (off by default)
- Pre-show checks for what no app can switch off: a waiting Windows restart first, then battery, Energy saver, Night light, the taskbar on every display, a Public network, a Remote Desktop session, and remote-access, backup and sync tools that are running
- showmode://on, off and toggle for Companion or a show-control script, and --status to see what it can see without changing anything
- x64 and ARM64 builds, with no installer and nothing that needs admin
Where it stands
Preview, released at v0.2.0 for Windows 11. It isn't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen warns the first time, and with Smart App Control on Windows won't run it at all. It has been bench-tested on two Windows 11 25H2 machines, an x64 VM and an ARM64 Parallels guest. Starting and ending a show put every setting back exactly, and so did killing the app mid-show and launching it again. The muting and the system sounds were checked by recording what actually came out, and the display lock and the cursor fence with two virtual screens beside the VM's own. The Windows key and the fence have only had input sent by a program, not a real keyboard and mouse. It hasn't done a show. The wallpaper blackout itself hasn't been run (both bench machines had Windows Spotlight, which it leaves alone), and neither have the hotkey, Launch at Login, a restart mid-show, a real projector or Windows 11 24H2. Try it on your own show PC before a show depends on it.