inspector-rust: Keyboard-First Tauri Desktop Toolkit

Overview

Inspector Rust is a keyboard-first desktop toolkit built on Tauri 2 and Rust, with a React and TypeScript interface. Its central idea is one searchable popup for clipboard history and everyday power-user actions, rather than a separate app for each utility. The README describes support for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

It is aimed at people who want to trigger tools from a global shortcut and keep their data on their own machine. The project combines clipboard management and text expansion with a broad set of commands for screenshots, OCR, calculations, system controls, and developer tasks. Its scope is unusually wide for a desktop utility, so it is worth checking which features work on your operating system before relying on them.

Key Features

• Search clipboard history, including text and rich content, with pinning and notes. The README describes deduplication and encrypted local storage.
• Expand snippets through passive typing, popup search, or hotkeys, with dynamic placeholders for dates, time, and clipboard contents.
• Capture screenshots and screen regions, annotate images, pin captures, and extract screen text using the platform's OCR support.
• Run inline calculations, converters, developer utilities, and a large catalog of commands from the search popup.
• Use additional desktop tools such as an audio equalizer, window management, system stats, brightness controls, and an app launcher. Feature availability varies by platform.
• Keep data local, with AES-256-GCM encryption at rest and keys stored in the operating system keychain, according to the README.

Use Cases

• A developer can keep frequently used code snippets, inspect clipboard history, and run quick JSON, hash, UUID, or conversion commands without leaving their current app.
• A support or research worker can capture a screen region, annotate it, and copy recognized text into another application.
• A power user switching between many applications can use one keyboard-driven popup for launching, clipboard retrieval, calculations, and system actions.
• A privacy-conscious desktop user can choose it when local storage and no telemetry matter more than having a narrowly focused utility.

Getting Started

Download a release for your operating system from the project's releases, or use the download page. See the README for platform notes, permissions, and feature-specific requirements.

Alternatives

• Deck: Deck focuses on searchable clipboard history for macOS, while inspector-rust also offers snippets, screenshots, OCR, and other commands across platforms.
• espanso: espanso specializes in system-wide text expansion, while inspector-rust combines snippets with clipboard history, screenshots, OCR, and other tools.

Considerations

The project is new and changing quickly. Recent activity includes frequent commits and releases, but the contributor base is small and work is highly concentrated in one person. The measured data also shows no issues closed or pull requests merged during the recent period, so activity should not be mistaken for demonstrated community support or response times.

The README documents platform-specific permissions and dependencies. Screen recording and media operations may require ffmpeg, and some tools rely on operating-system APIs or additional components. It also notes that Windows support for some features is not verified at runtime. Although the README reports a large test suite, the supplied project requirements data does not identify tests as a requirement; verify current CI and testing coverage directly before depending on it. The project is MIT-licensed.