Case study
Crane
A lightweight desktop capture utility — a global hotkey, a floating input, a searchable history of drops.
Tauri · React · TypeScriptCore idea
Crane is designed for fast, distraction-free capture. A global shortcut opens a compact overlay where you can drop a thought or paste a link, save it instantly, and hide the window again. The point is not to "open an app" — it's to never leave the one you're already in.
Hit the hotkey from anywhere.
1. Hit the hotkey
A global shortcut — Cmd + Shift + Space on macOS, Ctrl + Shift + Space elsewhere — pops the overlay over whatever you're doing. No window manager dance, no dock-bounce.
2. Drop a thought
The overlay focuses an input. Type a fragment, paste a URL, toggle into link mode if you want to tag it as a reference. Crane doesn't care what you put in — it cares that putting it in took zero context-switch.
3. Save and vanish
Return saves the drop and dismisses the overlay. The window collapses, the drop joins your history, and you're back in the document you were reading two seconds ago — no Spotlight queue, no half-finished Apple Note, no lost tab.
Hit the hotkey from anywhere.
1. Hit the hotkey
A global shortcut — Cmd + Shift + Space on macOS, Ctrl + Shift + Space elsewhere — pops the overlay over whatever you're doing. No window manager dance, no dock-bounce.
Drop a thought2. Drop a thought
The overlay focuses an input. Type a fragment, paste a URL, toggle into link mode if you want to tag it as a reference. Crane doesn't care what you put in — it cares that putting it in took zero context-switch.
Drop a thought3. Save and vanish
Return saves the drop and dismisses the overlay. The window collapses, the drop joins your history, and you're back in the document you were reading two seconds ago — no Spotlight queue, no half-finished Apple Note, no lost tab.
What it is good for
- Jotting down a fleeting idea without opening a full app
- Saving a link straight from a hotkey, no browser extension
- Keeping a simple, searchable history of captured notes and links
- Acting as a minimal "brain dump" companion while you're reading, researching, or building
A small history of what you saved
Every drop goes into a local list you can search and delete from. There's no sync, no account, no LLM rephrasing your sentence — it's a flat file with a search box on top.
Idea: capture as a noun, not a verb
text · just now
https://distill.pub/2017/momentum
link · 12m ago
Re-read: bret victor 'magic ink' (esp. context section)
text · 2h ago
Features
- Global hotkey to open the input overlay
- macOS: Cmd+Shift+Space
- Windows / Linux: Ctrl+Shift+Space
- Capture quick text entries and save them as drops
- Toggle link mode for URL captures
- Searchable history view with delete support
- Lightweight Tauri desktop app with native shortcuts and a tray menu
Development
The codebase is a Vite + React + TypeScript front end wrapped in Tauri 2 for the desktop shell. The four scripts you'll actually use:
npm install
npm run dev
npm run build
npm run tauri
Recommended IDE setup
VS Code with the Tauri extension and rust-analyzer for the Rust side. The Rust surface is small (mostly the src-tauri/ shell + the global-shortcut plugin wiring) but rust-analyzer pays for itself the first time you touch tauri.conf.json or a permission file.