Action Wheel Your favourite actions, one flick away.
Action Wheel pops a radial menu up right under your cursor. Flick towards a button to send a shortcut, launch an app or run a Windows action — in any app, without reaching for the keyboard.
Middle-click or press and hold here, then flick to a button.
Press. Flick. Done.
No hotkeys to memorise and no toolbar to aim at. The ring comes to your cursor, wherever it is.
Press
The middle mouse button by default. Or hold one button and press the other, or use a side button. Ctrl+Alt+Space always works too.
Flick
Keep holding and flick towards a button, then let go. Or let go straight away and click a button instead.
Done
The shortcut lands in the app you were using, the program starts, the window snaps. The ring is gone before you notice it.
Nine buttons. Endless setups.
Everything is set up in a proper settings window with a live preview, and saved as plain files you own.
Any action on any button
Send a keyboard shortcut, open a program, file, folder or URL, or run one of more than 30 built-in Windows actions — lock, sleep, snap, show the desktop, task view, volume mixer, clipboard history and more.
Hold for a second action
Press and hold a button for about half a second and it runs a different action. Two jobs per button, so nine buttons go a long way.
Groups
Turn a button into a small satellite ring of up to eight more.
Profiles
Keep a set of buttons for work, one for design, one for games. Switch from the tray menu, or from a button on the ring itself.
Lives in the tray
Starts with Windows if you like, can start hidden, and runs only once. Closing its window just hides it.
Make it look like yours
Every button has its own colours, shadow and icon — a glyph, your own SVG or PNG, the icon of the app it opens, or a short word or emoji.
- Button size and distance from the centre, with a live preview
- 7 opening animations, from an instant pop to a clockwise sweep
- 4 hover effects: grow and swap colours, glow, lift, or none
Try the animations and hover effects in the demo above — they are the same ones the app offers.
One-file backup
Every profile, the trigger, the ring's look and its icons in a single .zip. Before a restore it shows what is inside — including every program its buttons can start.
Never in your way
The ring never takes the focus, so shortcuts land where you meant them. It stays out of Alt+Tab and the taskbar, and Esc or a click elsewhere puts it away.
Your AI tools, on the ring.
Action Wheel looks for the AI tools already on your PC and only offers what is really there — a leftover registration or an installer stub never counts.
Open where you work
A command-line tool opens in a Windows Terminal tab, in the folder of the File Explorer window you were using. An editor opens that folder.
- Nothing is sent anywhere — you type into the tool yourself
- Switch any tool off in Settings and it leaves the menu
Ask about the selected text
Select text in any app and press a button such as Fix spelling and grammar with Claude Code. Copy the answer, or put it in place of the selection.
- Claude Code runs with every tool off; Codex in its read-only sandbox
- It shows the text and asks before sending it, through your own sign-in
Quiet by design.
It watches for one mouse gesture, and that is all it watches.
No telemetry
No usage data, no activity logs. Clicks, gestures and actions are never written down. (This website counts visits with Cloudflare's cookie-free Web Analytics. The app sends nothing.)
Your files, locally
Buttons, profiles and settings are plain files in %LOCALAPPDATA%\ActionWheel.
One small check
It asks GitHub whether a new release exists, at most about once a day. Nothing else goes online.
AI only on request
Text goes to an AI tool only from a task button you press, after you have seen it.
Get Action Wheel
Free and open source. One portable .zip — no installer, and .NET comes inside.
Download v2.11.0Windows 10 (1809) or later · x64 · 108 MB- Download the .zip above.
- Extract it anywhere, such as
C:\Tools\Action Wheel. - Run
Action Wheel.exe. It settles in the notification area — then middle-click anywhere.
Action Wheel.exe will not start, so run it as it comes out of the zip.Questions, answered.
Is Action Wheel free?
Yes. It is open source under the MIT license, with no paid tier and no ads. The code is on GitHub.
My mouse has no middle button, or I use it for something else.
Pick another trigger in Settings: hold the right button and press the left (or the other way round), or a side button. Ctrl+Alt+Space always opens the ring as well.
Why does Windows warn me when I first run it?
The download is not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen does not recognise the publisher. Choose More info → Run anyway if you trust it, or compare the zip with the SHA-256 checksum published next to it on the release page.
Does it work in every app?
In every normal app, yes. Windows blocks synthetic keystrokes into apps running as administrator, so a shortcut aimed at one will not arrive — Action Wheel tells you when that happens rather than failing silently.
Which AI tools does it support, and what does it send?
Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, Antigravity, Cursor, Windsurf and the Claude desktop app — whichever are installed. Opening a tool sends nothing. Tasks on selected text run with Claude Code or Codex only, show you the text first, and go through your own sign-in.
How do I uninstall it?
Turn off Start with Windows, quit from the tray icon and delete the folder. To remove your settings too, delete %LOCALAPPDATA%\ActionWheel.