Hi everyone! 👋

I wanted to share WritHer, a voice-powered productivity tool for Windows that I built in Python - and the part most relevant to this community is the floating pill-shaped widget at its heart, built entirely with Tkinter.

🎙️ What is WritHer?

Writher sits in your system tray and gives you two hands-free super-powers:

• Dictation (AltGr held) - transcribes your voice and pastes text into any focused window
• Assistant (Ctrl+R held) - understands natural-language commands to save notes, create appointments, set reminders, manage lists - all offline via faster-whisper + Ollama

🪟 The Tkinter widget

The visual core of the app is a borderless, always-on-top pill overlay - widget.py - that I call the "Pandora Blackboard" face.

What it does:

• Renders as a rounded dark capsule using tk.Canvas with create_oval / create_arc
• Draws a pair of expressive animated eyes that morph between states:
  • 😶 Idle - calm blinking pupils
  • 👂 Listening - pupils widen / animate inward
  • 🤔 Thinking - eyes spin or squint
  • 😊 Happy - eyes curve into an upward arc (smile eyes)
  • ❌ Error - X-shaped pupils
• Uses canvas.after() loops for smooth frame-by-frame animation - no external animation library needed
• Fully transparent window chrome (overrideredirect(True) + wm_attributes("-transparentcolor", ...))
• Draggable anywhere on screen

🔧 Tech stack (widget-relevant)

📁 Repo

👉 https://github.com/benmaster82/writher

The widget code lives in widget.py and the icon renderer in brand.py.

💡 Why Tkinter?

Tkinter felt like the right call for a lightweight, zero-dependency overlay that ships with Python and doesn't pull in a full UI framework. The challenge was making it feel alive - the animated eyes turn a plain status indicator into something with personality. Happy to discuss any of the canvas tricks used if anyone's curious!

Feedback and stars welcome 🙏