Status: experimental, but usable for prototypes and internal tools.

Highlights

• System webviews (no bundled Chromium)
• Cross‑platform Rust core with prebuilt binaries per OS/arch
• Simple Node/TypeScript API: app + BrowserWindow
• JSON‑RPC transport over stdio (no local servers)

Install

npm install nanoframe
# or
pnpm add nanoframe
# or
yarn add nanoframe
# or
bun add nanoframe

Peer/runtime requirements:

• Node.js 20+
• Platform core binary (auto-resolved) or local cargo-built nanoframe-core

Quick usage

import { app, BrowserWindow } from 'nanoframe'

await app.whenReady
const win = await BrowserWindow.create({
  title: 'My App',
  width: 800,
  height: 600,
  url: 'https://example.com'
})
await win.openDevTools()

API

app: App

• whenReady: Promise<void> – resolves when core is reachable
• on(event, cb) – events: ready, windowAllClosed
• createWindow(options) – convenience wrapper, same as BrowserWindow.create
• openDialog(options) – open file/directory dialog
• saveDialog(options) – save dialog
• getPath(name, appName?) – resolve OS paths
• openExternal(target) – open URL in default handler
• writeClipboardText(text) / readClipboardText()
• quit() – terminate the child core process

Environment flags:

• NANOF_DEV=1 – prefer local cargo build during development
• NANOF_FORCE_PLATFORM=1 – force platform package binary when available

BrowserWindow

Constructor is internal; use BrowserWindow.create(options).

Options (subset):

• title?: string
• width?: number, height?: number
• url?: string | html?: string
• iconPath?: string
• resizable?: boolean, alwaysOnTop?: boolean, fullscreen?: boolean
• decorations?: boolean, center?: boolean
• preload?: string (reserved)

Methods:

• show(), hide(), close()
• setIcon(path), setTitle(title)
• setSize(w, h), getSize()
• setPosition(x, y), getPosition()
• center(), focus(), maximize(), minimize(), unminimize()
• setAlwaysOnTop(bool), setResizable(bool), setFullscreen(bool), isFullscreen()
• setDecorations(bool), isVisible()
• eval(code), openDevTools()
• postMessage(payload)

How binaries are resolved

At runtime, the SDK tries the following in order:

1. If NANOF_DEV=1 or a local packages/nanoframe-core cargo project exists and NANOF_FORCE_PLATFORM is not set, run cargo run --release --bin nanoframe-core inside that directory.
2. Otherwise, resolve a platform package (@nanoframe/core-<platform>-<arch>) and execute the embedded binary.
3. Fallback: try nanoframe-core on PATH.

Example app

See examples/hello-world in the monorepo for an end-to-end minimal setup using TypeScript.

License

ICL – see repository root LICENSE.