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windows-rs lets you call Windows APIs — past, present, and future — directly from Rust. It is not a single crate but a family of them, from low-level API access to high-level declarative UI. This page helps you find the right crate for the job; each crate's own documentation then covers how to use it, with examples.

• 📁 Samples
• 🚀 Releases

Most of these crates are small and focused — string types, error handling, the registry, collections, and so on — and you depend only on what you actually use. For broad, exploratory access to the entire Windows API surface, the windows and windows-sys crates project everything past, present, and future, gated behind per-namespace features.

For most projects, prefer the focused crates below, and generate a minimal, project-specific binding with windows-bindgen for any additional APIs you need.

Start with what you are trying to do and add the smallest crate that covers it. Follow the link for usage and examples.

The full categorized index follows. Each crate has one page under crates/ covering both usage and internals — how the crate is built and maintained (the tool_bindings / tool_reactor / tool_package codegen pipeline, generated files, and conventions). Each crate's own readme.md is the user-facing introduction with a quick example, and the per-crate page links to it. Item-level API reference is the generated rustdoc on docs.rs, linked from every page.

The #[interface] and #[implement] macros are part of windows-core, split into the windows-interface and windows-implement crates only because Rust requires procedural macros to live in a dedicated proc-macro crate.

These crates package functionality that is part of other crates but must ship separately. windows-interface and windows-implement are part of windows-core (see above); Rust requires their proc macros to live in a dedicated proc-macro crate.

These crates project the entire Windows API surface. For new projects, prefer a focused binding generated with windows-bindgen, or compose the smaller crates above.