Show HN: TinyJS – small apps on Win/Mac/Linux

tinyjs.app

8 points by tarwin 2 weeks ago

Hi 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)

tarwin 2 weeks ago

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.

  • blondin 2 weeks ago

    This is a nice initiative. I will be trying the markdown editor.

    • tarwin 2 weeks ago

      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.

jrecyclebin 2 weeks ago

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!

  • tarwin 2 weeks ago

    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.