Better Posture ✨

A posture reminder utility to promote ergonomic habits.

Better Posture is a lightweight and robust Windows system-tray utility that helps you maintain better posture and take regular breaks. Never forget to stretch or adjust your position again!

💡 Features

• Lightweight and Minimal: As a native Go application that consumes minimal CPU and memory resources.
• Non-Blocking Notifications: Uses native Windows notifications (MessageBoxW + toast) in a non-blocking way, so the app remains responsive even while a message is visible.
• Live Countdown Timer: Displays the time remaining until the next reminder directly in the system tray tooltip and the menu itself.
• Customizable Intervals: Easily increase, decrease, or reset the reminder interval directly from the tray menu (from 1 minute up to 24 hours).
• Portable: The application is a single executable file with no external dependencies.
• Persistent Configuration: Stores your settings in %APPDATA%/BetterPosture/settings.json.
• Resilient & Safe: Automatically recovers from missing/corrupted settings files and sanitizes invalid values.
• Single-Instance Enforcement: Prevents multiple copies from running at once.

🛠️ Installation & Usage

🚀 Download Ready-to-Use Executable

1. Download the latest BetterPosture.exe from the Releases page.
2. Run the executable. The app immediately starts in the background.
3. Look for the Posture Reminder icon in your system tray (near the clock).

No installer, no setup.

⚙️ Build from Source (For Developers)

To build this project, you need Go 1.21+ installed.

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/rtorval/better-posture.git
   cd better-posture

2. Install Dependencies:

   go mod tidy

3. Embed Icon and Windows Resources:

   # Install the tool
   go install github.com/tc-hib/go-winres@latest
   
   # Generate Windows resource files (icon, metadata)
   go-winres make

4. Build the Executable: The -H=windowsgui flag is crucial to prevent the console window from flashing/appearing upon execution.

   go build -ldflags="-H=windowsgui" -o BetterPosture.exe .

📖 Configuration

Your settings are saved automatically.

• Path: %APPDATA%\BetterPosture\settings.json

Example:

{
    "interval_minutes": 3,
    "reminder_title": "Time to Move!",
    "reminder_message": "Stand up, stretch your back, and adjust your chair."
}

You can edit this file manually while the application is closed.

💻 Technical Details

Better Posture is built entirely in Go and uses:

• systray — cross-platform tray integration github.com/getlantern/systray

• windows (syscall wrapper) — for native Win32 API calls golang.org/x/sys/windows

• toast — Windows 10+ toast notifications "github.com/go-toast/toast"

• go-winres — embeds icons and metadata into the Windows executable github.com/tc-hib/go-winres

⚖️ License

© 2025 Rodrigo Toraño Valle

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.