TinyTrans

A lightweight WPF desktop translation tool that lives in your system tray.
Type or paste text, hit Ctrl+Enter, and get an instant LLM-powered translation — automatically copied to your clipboard.

Features

• Borderless floating window with no taskbar entry
• System tray resident — left-click toggles the window, right-click for menus
• Multiline input; Ctrl+Enter translates, plain Enter adds line breaks
• Translation auto-copied to clipboard
• Auto-swap: if source language matches your target, it inverts (EN ↔ ZH)
• Always-on-top toggle, start-at-login toggle
• Remembers window position across monitors; single-instance aware

Quick Start

Prerequisites: .NET 9 SDK, Windows (WSL can build/test with -p:EnableWindowsTargeting=true but cannot run the app).

# Build & run
dotnet build TinyTrans.sln
dotnet run --project TinyTrans

# Test
dotnet test TinyTrans.sln

# Publish (framework-dependent single-file exe)
dotnet publish TinyTrans -c Release -r win-x64

For WSL/Linux, add -p:EnableWindowsTargeting=true to every dotnet command.

Add --self-contained true to dotnet publish to bundle the .NET runtime.

Configuration

On first run a config.json is created next to the executable:

{
  "Endpoint": "https://api.deepseek.com/v1/chat/completions",
  "Model": "deepseek-v4-flash",
  "ApiKey": "sk-your-key-here",
  "AlwaysOnTop": false,
  "LastTargetLanguage": "EN"
}

Any OpenAI-compatible API works (DeepSeek, OpenAI, Ollama, etc.).

Usage

1. Launch — the window appears near the bottom-right of the screen.
2. Type or paste text; press Ctrl+Enter to translate.
3. The result appears and is already on your clipboard.
4. Right-click the tray icon for language, always-on-top, start-at-login, or exit.

Architecture

TinyTrans.sln
├── TinyTrans.Core          Domain logic (providers, config, orchestrator)
├── TinyTrans                WPF desktop app
└── TinyTrans.Core.Tests     xUnit tests

Module	Responsibility
OpenAiCompatibleTranslationProvider	Calls the LLM chat API
TranslationOrchestrator	Target-language state, auto-swap, translation flow
AppConfig / AppConfigStore	Settings values and config.json persistence
MainWindow	Borderless window, input/output, spinner
TrayIconService	System tray icon and context menu
SingleInstanceCoordinator	Single-instance enforcement

License

MIT