DevBox

A developer's Swiss Army knife for the desktop: a notes/snippets manager, plus utilities (hashing, encoding, formatting) to come.

Angular 22 (standalone components, signals, zoneless change detection) on the front, Rust / Tauri v2 as the native shell.

Status — the notes feature is complete end to end. The UI has no mock data left, every read and write crosses the invoke() bridge, and the Rust side persists to an embedded SQLite database. Business rules live in each feature's model.rs, which depends on neither Diesel nor Tauri. crypto and formatters are documented placeholders, not yet built.

What it does today, beyond writing notes:

Feature	What it gives you
Quick paste	Ctrl+Alt+P from anywhere: search a snippet, Enter copies it and the window steps aside
{{fields}}	psql -h {{host}} -p {{port=5432}} asks for its values before landing in the clipboard
Keyboard canvas	arrows to move, Enter open, C copy, P pin, X select, Del trash
Trash	deleting is undoable, and reversible for 30 days
Bulk actions	select several notes, then move, tag, export or trash them in one go
Tag management	rename, merge or drop a tag across the whole library
Attachments	drop a file on the editor or paste an image; open it, save it elsewhere, preview it inline
Import / export	a JSON bundle both ways — everything, one space, or the selection — with a report either way
Copy as Markdown	the selection rendered for a PR, a ticket or a chat message

Prerequisites

• Node.js 20+ and npm
• Rust (via rustup)
• Tauri's system dependencies for your OS — see the Tauri prerequisites

Getting started

npm install          # also needed before the first Rust build: Tauri's build script reads the front-end config
npm run tauri dev    # Angular dev server + Tauri window

Front-end changes hot-reload; Rust changes trigger an automatic (slower) recompile.

npm start serves the front-end alone on http://localhost:1420, but data loading needs the Tauri runtime: outside the app window every invoke() fails and the notes canvas shows its retry screen. Use it for pure styling work, npm run tauri dev for anything else.

Scripts

Command	What it does
npm start	Angular dev server only, port 1420
npm run tauri dev	Full dev loop: Angular dev server + Tauri window
npm run build	Production Angular build → dist/devbox/browser
npm run tauri build	Full production build → src-tauri/target/release
npm test	Unit tests (Vitest, jsdom — no browser required)
npm run test:watch	Tests, re-running on change
npm run test:coverage	Tests with a v8 coverage report (80% thresholds)
npm run lint	ESLint + Prettier check
npm run lint:fix	ESLint --fix + Prettier write

For Rust-only iteration, cargo check from src-tauri/ is much faster than a full tauri build.

Layout

src/              Angular front-end (core/ state & data, features/ screens, layout/, shared/)
src-tauri/src/
  notes/          The notes feature: model.rs, language.rs, view.rs, placeholder.rs,
                  trash.rs, store.rs
  spaces/         The spaces feature: model.rs, store.rs
  attachments/    The attachments feature: model.rs, store.rs (the bytes live on disk)
  transfer/       Import, export, share: the exchange format and the Markdown rendering
  db.rs           Connection, migrations, schema, stored-instant format
  error.rs        The three errors and the translation between them
  desktop.rs      Tray and global shortcuts — native glue, not a feature
docs/             Architecture notes and UI mockup

Both halves are filed by subject, not by technical nature. On the Rust side each feature owns its model, its SQL and the commands that expose it: <feature>.rs holds the #[tauri::command]s, <feature>/model.rs the rules, <feature>/store.rs the SQL. Deleting src-tauri/src/notes/ deletes the feature.

Documentation

• Architecture — front-end structure, state and data-access patterns, i18n, theming, the Angular ↔ Rust IPC boundary, and testing conventions.
• docs/scratch-mockup-v2.html — static UI mockup used as the visual reference. Not code to run or import.

Roadmap

• Notes UI: spaces, search, filters, tag rail, pinned/today/week sections, editor overlay with code viewer
• French/English localization with persisted locale
• Front-end IPC seam: typed invoke() wrapper, DTOs/mappers and Tauri repositories, wired as the app's only data source in core/data/data.providers.ts
• Full note editing: content, format, tags, pin, deletion
• Spaces: notes carry a spaceId, the switcher filters on it and can create a space
• ESLint + Prettier, with template accessibility rules
• Persistence: embedded SQLite through Diesel (libsqlite3-sys bundled) with append-only, embedded migrations
• Business rules isolated in each feature's model.rs, testable without a database
• Rust tests, clippy (deny(clippy::all)) and rustfmt
• Renaming and deleting a space, its notes moved to a refuge space in one transaction
• Moving a note between spaces (spaceId is part of NotePatch)
• 30-day trash with Ctrl+Z undo, multiple selection and bulk actions
• Global tag management: rename, merge, drop across the library
• {{fields}} in snippets, and a quick-paste palette on a global shortcut
• Attachments (drop, paste, open, save), and import / export / share
• crypto module: SHA-256, MD5, UUID generation
• formatters module: base64 encode/decode, JSON formatting

Conventions

Code comments, docstrings and UI strings are written in French. Test descriptions and test comments are in English, matching Vitest/Angular community conventions.

The front-end is linted with ESLint (angular-eslint, including its template accessibility rules) and formatted with Prettier — run npm run lint before pushing. The Rust side is gated by cargo clippy -- -D warnings and cargo fmt --check; unsafe_code is forbidden in Cargo.toml.

Recommended IDE setup

VS Code + Tauri + rust-analyzer + Angular Language Service, or JetBrains RustRover / WebStorm.