VocabGlance runs quietly in your system tray and periodically slides a word card onto your screen — above Chrome, VS Code, or anything you're using. No app to open. Words come to you.
Free & open source · ~70 MB · Works offline · No account needed
Anki, Duolingo, flashcard apps — they all need you to open them, sit down, and study. That works if you have dedicated study time. But for a working developer, available attention is already fully allocated.
Words encountered in reading — in editorials, documentation, articles — get forgotten within days because there's no reinforcement loop.
Vocabulary retention doesn't require active study. It requires repeated exposure over time. If you see a word often enough, even for five seconds, it sticks.
VocabGlance delivers that exposure automatically. You keep working. Words find you.
Download the installer, run it, and start adding words you encounter while reading. Paste one per line with a definition, or add them one by one with pronunciation and synonyms.
Choose how often a word appears — from every 30 seconds to once an hour. Pick the popup corner, display duration, and word order. Then minimize the dashboard.
Keep working normally. Every few minutes a word card glides onto your screen above everything else. Glance, tap "Got it" or "Still learning", and get back to work.
The popup uses Electron's highest alwaysOnTop level — it appears above fullscreen apps, video players, and games. Without stealing your keyboard focus.
Set reminders from 30 seconds to 1 hour. Choose popup display duration from 5 to 30 seconds. Pause and resume from the system tray at any time.
Three word order modes: Random shuffle, chronological order, or newest-first. Mastered words appear 5× less often — still visible for reinforcement, not crowding out new ones.
Each word stores a definition, pronunciation (shown as /ih-FEM-er-ul/ in the popup), and comma-separated synonyms rendered as gold pill tags. All fields optional.
Tap "Got it" on a popup to mark a word as mastered. A seen counter and progress bar per word tracks how many times each word has appeared. Reset progress anytime.
Full dark and light mode with a System option that follows your Windows setting in real time. Both the dashboard and the popup card respect the active theme automatically.
Paste a block of words, one per line, with optional colon-separated definitions. Duplicates and invalid entries are silently skipped. Import 50 words in seconds.
Export your entire word bucket as a plain JSON file. Import it back on any machine. Data is stored locally in AppData — no account, no cloud, no subscription.
Every few minutes, this card slides onto your screen from the corner — above every other application.
Manages all OS-level functionality — window creation, system tray, login items, and the always-on-top popup window mechanism.
Powers both the dashboard (word management) and the popup card as separate React roots in separate Electron BrowserWindows.
Handles the multi-entry build — main process, preload script, and two renderer entry points (dashboard + popup) — with hot reload in development.
Serializes all word and settings data as a plain JSON file in AppData. No database, no migrations. Human-readable and trivially portable.
Builds the NSIS Windows installer. Bundles Chromium, Node.js, and all app code into a distributable .exe file with Start Menu integration.
Automatically builds and publishes a new .exe release to GitHub Releases on every version tag push. No manual build steps required.
Renderer processes have zero Node.js access. All IPC goes through a typed contextBridge preload — the standard Electron security model.
Dashboard uses React Context with nativeTheme OS detection. Popup receives theme as an IPC primitive since it runs in a separate process.
No network requests after install. All data lives in a local JSON file. The app loads instantly and works without any internet connection.
Two-layer React ErrorBoundary catches any render crash and shows a recovery UI with "Try Again" and "Reload" — no white screens.
Free and open source. No account. No subscription. Works fully offline. Your words stay on your machine.