Dev log #1

What I’m building: Snap - a desktop tool that lets you run AI actions on selected text anywhere on your system. Highlight text in any app, press a shortcut, and get an instant result in a floating window. No copy and paste, no switching to a browser tab.

The idea came from the tldr repo on GitHub. I wanted to generalize that concept system-wide into two workflows:

• Summarize (Alt + S) — highlight a dense article or long thread, and a floating window appears with a summary.
• Rewrite (Alt + E) — highlight a prompt like “write an email to my boss”, and the AI returns finished email ready to send.

Framework choice: I looked at Electron and Tauri. Electron ships a full Chromium runtime, heavy and slow, so I went with Tauri. The catch: Tauri’s backend is Rust, which I don’t know. Starting to learn it today. The upside is the frontend is TypeScript + React, which I’m already strong in, so the learning curve is contained to the system level layer.

Today’s goal: setup the Tauri app, register the Alt + S / Alt + E global shortcuts, and get the silent copy -> clipboard read working so a selection in any app lands in the Rust backend. If that’s solid, wire one shortcut end-to-end to an LLM call and render the result in the floating window.