PecoFence: a free Windows 11 desktop organiser with a CLI your agent can drive

Fences, tabs and a peek shortcut, on a Windows Composition foundation

PecoFence is described as a free, open-source Stardock Fences alternative for Windows 11, and its pitch is that you keep files in glass panels, switch projects with tabs, and can ask an AI agent to configure the layout, appearance and sorting rules through a built-in CLI. The features section describes the mechanics. Related fences can be kept together as tabs, so you switch from Project to Ideas in a click and drag a tab out when you want the extra room. There is a Peek shortcut, Ctrl plus Alt plus Space, that brings your fences above the current application so you can grab what you need, with Escape returning you. A fence can be rolled up to its title and expanded on hover, layouts can be locked, and double-clicking the desktop hides your fences and double-clicking again brings them back. The topics list direct2d and the Cargo manifest lists windows-composition and windows-canvas, so the visual work is done with the Windows Composition stack rather than in a web view.

The CLI is the point, and it is designed to be read by an agent

The section headed your desktop configured by your AI describes a bundled pecofence-cli that lets Claude Code, Codex and Cursor read your current setup and apply changes directly in PecoFence. The suggested request is a good example of how the workflow is meant to run, telling the agent to read the pecofence-cli skill and the describe command, inspect the current settings and fences, back up the configuration before changes, and then switch to dark mode and make all fences more transparent. Underneath, the commands are ordinary. You export a configuration, save a snapshot, create a fence, add a sorting rule for a file extension, apply the rules, set the theme, and set opacity across all fences at once.

pecofence-cli config export "$env:USERPROFILE\pecofence-before-ai.json"
pecofence-cli snapshot save before-cleanup
pecofence-cli fence create --title Docs
pecofence-cli rule add --name PDFs --ext pdf --to Docs --index 0
pecofence-cli rule apply
pecofence-cli settings set theme dark
pecofence-cli fence set --all opacity clear

The describe command exposes the command catalog and JSON Schemas, the skill command prints the agent guide, JSON results report what changed, and structured application errors are there to help the agent choose its next step. That is a lot of care spent on making a tool legible to a model, and it is the clearest thing distinguishing this from the commercial tools it resembles.

Sorting rules that keep files where you put them

The rules system is what stops a desktop organiser from becoming a filing exercise. Rules can match on file types, extensions, names, wildcards, shortcut targets, time and size, and new files find their fence automatically. The README is careful about a specific behaviour that desktop tools often get wrong. Automatic sorting rules keep files in their original locations, and file moves you initiate work like they do in File Explorer. So the tool does not relocate your files behind your back; it only claims new arrivals for the fence you assigned. The rule command in the example takes a name, an extension, a destination fence and an index, which tells you the rules are ordered and that placement within a fence is controllable. The CLI documentation page is linked from the README for the full command reference, and a separate features document holds the complete list.

Live folders, file handling and the small memory footprint

Beyond the fences and the rules, the feature table lists the everyday details. There are Fluent and Liquid Glass themes, light and dark modes, per-fence colours, opacity and icon tinting. File handling is familiar, with File Explorer context menus, drag and drop, copy and paste, multi-select, thumbnails, and icon, list and details views. A live folder on the desktop lets you browse subfolders and see changes as they happen. There is also a way back, with layout snapshots, daily backups, configuration import and export, and the ability to swap fences between displays. The footprint claim is specific. It is a native Rust application that idles at about 40 MB of memory in Task Manager, and the WebView2 settings panel loads on demand rather than at startup. That last point is a design decision with a purpose, since the WebView2 runtime is the heavy part.

Three ways to install, and what the requirements are

The Microsoft Store edition is signed by Microsoft, updates automatically and never shows a SmartScreen prompt. The same application also comes as a portable ZIP, which you download from the repository's releases page as pecofence-v<version>-x64-portable.zip, extract the whole ZIP into a folder and run pecofence.exe, and as an installer, pecofence-v<version>-x64-setup.exe, which installs for your Windows user with a Start menu entry and an uninstaller. There is also winget, where winget install DayuanJiang.PecoFence installs the portable build and skips the SmartScreen prompt. The requirements are Windows 10 22H2, or Windows 11 22H2 or later, and the Settings panel needs the Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime, which Windows 11 includes and Windows 10 users install from Microsoft if Settings does not open. The first launch creates four fences in your selected language, and there are ten languages listed in the README links, with English, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian.

A Cargo workspace of seven crates, with two vendored Windows crates

The workspace lists its members and they map to the product's layers. There is crates/core, crates/platform, crates/render, crates/app, crates/watchdog, crates/ipc and crates/cli, plus tools/bindgen. The split tells you where the complexity sits, with a separate crate for rendering and one for watching the filesystem so the sorting rules can react to new files. The workspace uses resolver 3, edition 2024, requires Rust 1.95, and declares Apache-2.0 as the licence. The dependency set is almost entirely the windows crate family at version 0.100, covering core, numerics, window, canvas, composition and webview, with the windows-canvas dependency carrying the composition feature and windows-composition carrying the system feature. serde and serde_json handle the configuration, uuid generates identifiers, tracing and tracing-subscriber do the logging, clap parses the command line, and schemars is there to generate the JSON Schemas the CLI exposes. The two vendored crates under vendor/ are patched copies of the upstream 0.100.0 releases, one to add raw accessors so the render crate can reach Composition APIs, and one to add a locale-aware text format so DirectWrite draws Chinese file names with the right font instead of the Japanese UI font.

Editorial conclusion

PecoFence fits a Windows user who wants Stardock-style desktop organisation without paying for it, and who is willing to work in a young 0.2.x project that only runs on Windows. It does not fit a macOS or Linux user, since the whole thing is built on Windows Composition APIs, and it does not fit someone who wants a polished, feature-complete replacement for a commercial product. Verify first that your Windows build meets the stated 22H2 requirement and that the Edge WebView2 runtime is present, try the portable ZIP before installing anything, and read the CLI documentation before pointing an agent at it, since the commands act on your real desktop layout.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. DayuanJiang/PecoFence on GitHub
2. License: Apache-2.0
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases