Show HN: TinyJS – small apps on Win/Mac/Linux
tinyjs.appHi all. I'm Tarwin. I've been working on TinyJS for about 6 weeks now.
I was sick of installing 500mb Electron apps for every little utility. The last straw was Harvest updating from 5mb to 500mb in latest release.
Tauri exists (and it's great) but I wanted something that was JS first. So I built this on top of txikijs, a tools that includes QuickJS and SQLite already.
TinyJS does what it says it does. Small apps that can do almost anything. 100% JS.
As part of building a tool like this I also built a lot of example apps, to test and understand required functionality on all three systems. The two I am most proud of are:
amp: like winamp, but with a bunch of extra stuff like being able to play tracker files, and internet radio
nib: I'd like to think it will soon be the best editor for documentation (specifically) in markdown
I've also experimented with re-wrapping many of the apps I already have downloaded. Some just work (Harvest), some possibly could ie Slack. I know some apps will never make sense to use tinyjs but that's ok.
I just want to save room on people's ever pricier SSDs! (and make computers fun again with silly things like pigeons that fly across your screen for now reason)
Comments
Sorry a quick addendum. Yes, a lot of it was built with me + Claude. I'd like to think that I authored it, but understand if others feel differently about that. 100s of hours of work was put into ideas, testing, understanding etc.
This is a nice initiative. I will be trying the markdown editor.
Thanks. The markdown editor is "almost there". Needs a tiny bit more work before I can really say it's the best (specifically for docs). But it does have automatic updates so if you get it now promise it will be better very soon.
At first blush, seems well thought out. README is quite thorough and readable - really appreciate that you've worked on shipping on Mac. Don't know much about txiki.js - will have to play with it.
Good luck!
Thank you, appreciate the comment. txiki is good, but more of a nodejs but small (and slow). tinyjs.app is the thing I wrote on top of that great foundation for all the windowing stuff.
i tried tinyjs last week after seeing a thread in X! https://github.com/scarranca/issue-kanban created a small kanban to see the issues from git, me and my agent loved tinyjs
Glad you enjoyed it.