askkit

A unified, local desktop AI chatbot that lives in your system tray, ready to launch instantly whenever you need assistance.

Approaches

I wanted to build a simple desktop chatbot that could connect to many AI models through APIs and pop up quickly by just pressing a shortcut (Win+/). I really needed code highlighting, and it could be best achieved by parsing the syntax manually using tree-sitter. However, it felt like too much work and I ended up going for tauri, a framework that uses web front-end and is lightweight on the bundle size. Thanks to the web ecosystem, I could build a rich text editor using the least amount of work.

Frontend

• SvelteKit
• Tailwind CSS
• Tiptap
• Vite

Backend

• Rust
• Sqlite

Desktop Integration

• Tested on Windows only.

Roadmap

• Chat launcher (Win+/)
• Main application window
• Google providers: Gemini.
• Groq providers: Llama, GPT, etc.
• OpenAI providers: GPT-5, GPT-4, gpt-oss, etc.