pal

A launcher, a menu bar and a place for your small tools, on one hotkey.
Apps, files, windows, clipboard and 193 palettes in one search, bar items that show only what matters, and every piece of it a TypeScript extension you can read and change. macOS and Linux.

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_{The real panel: chr finds Chrome, 12 usd to try is answered at the root, #ff8800 opens the colour picker.}

Press the hotkey and type. pal searches everything at once and answers what it can without leaving the search bar:

• One search. Apps, windows, files, bookmarks, browser tabs, clipboard history, emoji, system commands and every installed palette answer one query, ranked by what you pick. Nothing matches? The query falls back to the web, a quicklink or a palette.
• Answers inline. 3pm in tokyo, 12 usd to try, days until 25 dec, 210k / 12, #ff8800, ~/Downloads: a sum, a currency, a date, a colour or a path is answered in the first row.
• 193 palettes in 80 extensions. 33 come with pal, the ones that need no account or setup (Clipboard History, Files, Window Management, Audio, Wi-Fi, Media, Timer and more); the rest install in a keystroke when you want them: GitHub, Gmail, Slack, Spotify, Calendar, Google Search, Hue, Home Assistant, Docker, Obsidian, 1Password, Immich, flashcards and a shelf of games. Type a name and an extension you don't have yet shows up to install (Palettes).
• Updates on their own. Extensions update between pal releases, signed and checked, and one that breaks is put back by itself. Anyone can publish a registry of their own (registries).
• A menu bar of its own. 26 extensions put an item on the bar: the lyric playing, the next meeting, who holds your camera, your open PRs. An item hides while it has nothing to say, and a click opens a popover to act from. The same items draw on the macOS menu bar, on sketchybar and on Linux bars.
• Fast. 1.7 ms from hotkey to a painted panel on a release build, about a millisecond to match a keystroke over 17k rows, and slow sources stream in below what is already there instead of holding the list back (notes/linux.md, notes/decisions.md).
• Yours. Every palette and bar item, the bundled ones included, is a directory with a pal.json and an index.ts. Everything is set in Settings and mirrored to one TOML file for your dotfiles, and every action is a pal command and a pal:// link.

Clipboard history: text, links, colours, images and files, searchable, with pins, a preview and the app it came from.	GitHub: your pull requests, reviews, issues and notifications, with checks, merge and checkout on keys.
Calculator: sums, units, currencies, time zones and dates (next friday, workdays until 25 dec), with variables of your own.	Window management: halves, thirds, twenty layouts and moves between displays, each with a hotkey if you want one.
Spotify: search, play, queue, like and add to a playlist, and a lyrics view that follows the song.	Calendar: your day, new events from a sentence, and a Join row at the top of pal five minutes before a call.
Sessions: your Claude Code, Codex and Copilot CLI sessions, which one is working and which waits on you, and their transcripts.	Flashcards: spaced repetition (FSRS) in ten-card sessions, Spanish out of the box, and any Anki deck.
Battery & Power: what drains the battery now, today and this week, in watts and watt-hours.	Philips Hue: rooms, lights, scenes and sensors, over the bridge's local API.

Each extension's page in the store has its screenshots, keys, settings and source.

An extension's render() says what its item shows: a glyph, a short title, a badge or a progress fill, or nothing while there is nothing to say. Privacy appears only while an app has your camera, microphone or screen; Calendar turns amber before a meeting; Audio flashes the volume for three seconds after you change it. A click, a hotkey or a hover opens the popover. Items can also show or hide on states (the time, the front app, the network, idle, or your own), with rules set per item in Settings › Bar (Extensions).

The 26 that ship: Spotify, Now Playing, Calendar, GitHub, Gmail, Slack, WhatsApp, Sessions, Privacy, Battery & Power, Stats, Network, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Audio, Displays, Weather, Timer, One-time codes, Hue, Docker, Grafana, Odak, Theater, Tela and States.

Sudoku (made on your machine, graded by technique, three-step hints), daily Crosswords from Crosshare and the Turkish papers, Solitaire, Minesweeper, Snake II (the Nokia 3310's, frame for frame), Yahtzee, Wordle, 2048, Blackjack, a monkeytype-style Typing test, and Night Parade, a survivors game of fifteen-minute nights against a parade of yokai. Each plays one-handed on the arrows and Enter, and ⌘⇧F plays it at 90% of the screen.

Things pal does on its own, each a card in Settings › Features with its switch and settings (Features):

• Clipboard history, recorded in the background into a local SQLite database; apps on an exclude list (Keychain Access and Passwords by default) are never recorded.
• Text expansion: snippets that expand as you type, in any app.
• A window switcher on a held chord (alt+tab, or cmd+tab in place of macOS's own).
• A sidebar: a live palette docked to a screen edge.
• Keep below the bar: windows are moved clear of a sketchybar strip over a hidden menu bar.
• Mouse and trackpad: three-finger middle click, scroll direction per device, and the pointer hidden while idle.
• Keycast: your keys and clicks drawn on screen, for recordings and screen shares.

Enter runs a row, ⌘K opens its actions, ⌘I its detail pane, and any action's shortcut runs it straight from the list. Rows that take values ask for them in the search bar (a timer's duration, an ssh command, a Slack status: Tab moves into the fields). ⌘-click, ⇧-click or ⇧↓ marks several rows, and the actions that make sense for a list run on all of them: open, copy, move, star, snooze. The whole grammar is in Keyboard.

An extension is a directory with a pal.json and an index.ts. A palette answers list() with rows and pick() with an effect: copy, paste, open, a toast, a form, a deeper level, a view. pal draws the list, the grid, the detail pane and the view; the extension never touches a pixel.

import { defineExtension, type Item } from "@zcag/pal";

export default defineExtension({
  palettes: {
    hello: {
      title: "Hello",
      list: (): Item[] => [
        { id: "greet", name: "Hello, world", icon: "👋",
          actions: [{ id: "copy", title: "Copy" }] },
      ],
      pick: () => ({ copy: "Hello, world" }),
    },
  },
});

pal install . loads it, and anyone can pal install github:you/repo. From there the same API grows into:

• Views: a render tree for dashboards, detail pages and pickers (View palettes).
• Surfaces: a sandboxed page of your own, for a game or anything a view cannot draw (Game surfaces).
• Bar items, forms, typed arguments, links of your own, and several accounts of one extension (a personal and a work Gmail).
• Streaming: ctx.partial(items) shows what is ready while a slow listing is still working (Slow listings).

The walkthrough is in Extensions, the smallest complete examples in examples/ (a palette, a surface, script commands, themes), and the API is @zcag/pal in sdk/. No TypeScript needed for the simple cases: a shell script or a data file makes a palette too (Scripts and data files).

One TOML file holds every setting: the hotkey, each palette's alias and hotkey, each extension's settings, and secrets as references into the keychain. The Settings window writes the same file, a hand edit is picked up live, and a theme file recolours every window (Config).

# ~/.config/pal/config.toml
[general]
hotkey = "ctrl+space"
theme_file = "catppuccin-frappe"
extension_dirs = ["~/dotfiles/pal-extensions"]

[palettes.emoji]
alias = "em"

Every action is a pal command and a pal:// link, from a shell, a keybind, a browser or a Shortcuts action (CLI, Links):

pal open emoji/emoji -q smile          # the panel inside a palette
git branch | pal pick                  # pal as a picker for a script
open "pal://timer/start?duration=25m"  # a link from anywhere

Download from pal.cagdas.io: a dmg for Apple silicon and Intel Macs, an AppImage and a deb for Linux. pal updates itself from there on.

The macOS builds are signed with pal's own certificate, not notarised, so Gatekeeper refuses the first launch once; Getting started has the three ways past it. Permissions (Accessibility, Input Monitoring and the rest) are asked for when a feature needs them, never at launch, and survive updates.

The same panel, palettes and extensions on X11 and Wayland. Getting started has the setup for GNOME, KDE and Hyprland, and the Wayland hotkey caveat.

Prerequisites: Rust (stable), Node 20+, Bun 1.4 or newer (the pinned release in app/scripts/fetch-bun.sh; a 1.3 bun install rewrites every bun.lock in the tree), and the Tauri v2 system prerequisites for your platform (Xcode command line tools and cmake on macOS; webkit2gtk-4.1, gtk3, librsvg, openssl and base-devel on Linux).

git clone [email protected]:zcag/pal.git && cd pal
(cd app && npm install)
bun install
for d in extensions/*/; do
  [ -f "$d/package.json" ] && (cd "$d" && bun install)
done
cd app && npm run tauri dev

In dev the host and the extensions load from the repo and reload when a file changes. On macOS, make app builds a release and installs it to /Applications, signed with the same certificate as releases so it keeps their permissions.

cd app && npm run tauri build

Issues and pull requests are welcome at github.com/zcag/pal. make test runs what CI runs on every push, on macOS and Ubuntu: clippy with warnings as errors, the Rust tests, the SDK build, the app's typecheck and vitest, the host's typecheck (which covers sdk/, extensions/ and examples/) and bun test (its rules), and the SDK's pack. Docs are linted with npx markdownlint-cli2 "docs/**/*.md" README.md.

An extension of your own needs no pull request against the app: publish it on GitHub and anyone can pal install github:you/repo. To list it in the store, open a pull request adding its github: spec to community.json at this repo's root.

MIT, see LICENSE. What pal ships that is not its own (the Bun runtime, the Nerd Fonts symbols, the MediaRemote adapter) is listed with its licence in NOTICES.md.