Burrow

A fast, keyboard-driven application launcher for Linux

One input bar. Apps, files, AI chat, SSH, passwords, math — all at your fingertips.

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Features

• App search — Fuzzy-match installed desktop applications, ranked by frecency (frequency + recency)
• File search — Find files by name across configured directories
• Content search — Semantic search over file contents using Ollama embeddings and cosine similarity
• SSH hosts — Search and connect to hosts from ~/.ssh/config
• 1Password — Search and auto-type or copy credentials via 1Password CLI
• Calculator — Inline math evaluation with copy support
• AI chat — Conversational AI with optional RAG context from indexed files (Ollama or OpenRouter)
• Launch history — Frecency-ranked recent launches for instant access
• Special commands — Extensible #-prefixed commands (e.g. #cowork)
• Modifier keys — Shift+Enter and Ctrl+Enter trigger alternate actions per category (see MODIFIERS.md)

Fuzzy app search	File search

Quick Start

Requirements

• Linux with Wayland
• Tauri v2 prerequisites
• Portless on PATH for the default dev workflow
• wtype and wl-copy for typing and clipboard
• Ollama for content search and AI chat (optional)
• 1Password CLI for password integration (optional)

Install

git clone https://github.com/beastyrabbit/burrow.git
cd burrow
pnpm install

# Development (hot-reload)
pnpm tauri dev

# Production build
pnpm tauri build

The production binary is output to src-tauri/target/release/burrow.

Usage

Query Prefixes

Type a prefix to route your query to a specific provider:

Prefix	Provider	Example
(none)	App search (or math if expression detected)	firefox, 2+2
(space)	File search	notes.md
* (space + asterisk)	Content/vector search	*rust lifetime
!	1Password	!github
ssh	SSH hosts	ssh prod
#	Special commands	#cowork
?	AI chat	?explain this error

An empty query shows your most frequently launched apps.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Key	Action
Enter	Execute default action
Shift+Enter	Alternate action (copy password, open dir in terminal, copy math result)
Ctrl+Enter	Secondary action (copy username, open in VS Code, copy SSH command)
Arrow Up/Down	Navigate results
Escape	Clear search / close

See MODIFIERS.md for the full modifier key action table per category.

CLI

Burrow includes a full CLI for managing the launcher without the GUI.

burrow                        Launch the GUI
burrow toggle                 Toggle window visibility

Indexing

burrow reindex [-q]           Full reindex of all configured directories
burrow update [-q]            Incremental update (only new/modified files)
burrow index <file> [-f]      Index a single file (--force to re-index)
burrow progress               Show current indexer progress

System

burrow health [--json]        Check system health (Ollama, Vector DB, API key)
burrow stats [--json]         Show statistics (indexed files, launch count)
burrow config [--path]        Open config file in editor (--path to print path)

Daemon

burrow daemon                 Start the background daemon
burrow daemon start [-b]      Start daemon (--background to daemonize)
burrow daemon stop            Stop a running daemon
burrow daemon status          Check daemon status

AI Chat

burrow chat "query"           Chat with AI (no document context)
burrow chat-docs "query"      Chat with AI using document context (RAG)
burrow chat --small "query"   Use small/fast model instead of large
burrow chat-docs --small "q"  Use small model with RAG context

Models

burrow models list            Show current model configuration
burrow models set             Interactive model configuration
burrow models set chat_large  Configure a specific model type

Model types: embedding, chat, chat_large — Providers: ollama, openrouter

History

burrow history                List recent launch history
burrow history list           List recent launch history
burrow history clear          Clear all launch history
burrow history remove <id>    Remove specific item from history

Configuration

Config file: ~/.config/burrow/config.toml — auto-created with defaults on first run.

Environment variables (BURROW_*) override config file values. For example, BURROW_OLLAMA_URL overrides ollama.url.

Models

[models.embedding]
name = "qwen3-embedding:8b"
provider = "ollama"

[models.chat]
name = "gpt-oss:20b"
provider = "ollama"

[models.chat_large]
name = "gpt-oss:120b"
provider = "ollama"

All Defaults

Section	Key	Default
ollama	url	http://localhost:11434
ollama	timeout_secs	30
ollama	chat_timeout_secs	120
models.embedding	name / provider	qwen3-embedding:8b / ollama
models.chat	name / provider	gpt-oss:20b / ollama
models.chat_large	name / provider	gpt-oss:120b / ollama
chat	rag_enabled	true
chat	max_context_snippets	5
vector_search	enabled	true
vector_search	top_k	10
vector_search	min_score	0.3
vector_search	max_file_size_bytes	1000000
vector_search	index_mode	all
vector_search	index_dirs	~/Documents, ~/Projects, ~/Downloads
indexer	interval_hours	24
indexer	file_extensions	txt, md, rs, ts, tsx, js, py, toml, yaml, yml, json, sh, css, html, pdf, doc, docx, xlsx, xls, pptx, odt, ods, odp, csv, rtf
indexer	max_content_chars	4096
history	max_results	6
search	max_results	10
search	debounce_ms	80
openrouter	api_key	"" (empty)

Architecture

Burrow is a Tauri v2 app with a React + TypeScript frontend and a Rust backend. The frontend communicates with the backend through Tauri's IPC bridge (or an axum HTTP bridge on 127.0.0.1:3001 during development, enabling browser-based testing with Playwright).

Input routing is prefix-based — the router inspects the first characters of a query and dispatches to the appropriate provider. Launch history is stored in SQLite (~/.local/share/burrow/history.db). Semantic content search uses Ollama to generate embeddings, stored as BLOBs in a separate SQLite database (~/.local/share/burrow/vectors.db) with brute-force cosine similarity — no HNSW index needed at the expected scale.

Development

# Full Tauri app with hot-reload (backend + frontend)
pnpm tauri dev

# Frontend dev server only (served through Portless; backend bridge still listens on 127.0.0.1:3001)
pnpm dev

# Print the current worktree-aware dev URL
pnpm dev:url

# Bypass Portless and use raw Vite on http://localhost:1420
PORTLESS=0 pnpm dev

pnpm dev and pnpm tauri dev use worktree-aware Portless hostnames by default. The main checkout serves at http://burrow.localhost:1355; linked worktrees use http://<branch>.burrow.localhost:1355.

Testing

# Rust unit tests
cd src-tauri && cargo test

# Playwright e2e tests (starts test-server + pnpm dev automatically if needed)
npx playwright test

Project Structure

src/                         React frontend
  App.tsx                    Main UI component
  types.ts                   Shared types
  mock-tauri.ts              HTTP bridge client for browser/Playwright testing
src-tauri/src/               Rust backend
  cli/                       CLI (clap) — subcommands, output formatting
  commands/                  Search providers (apps, files, ssh, onepass, vectors, chat, etc.)
  actions/                   Modifier key action dispatch
  router.rs                  Query classification and search dispatch
  config.rs                  TOML configuration with env var overrides
  indexer.rs                 Background file indexer
  ollama.rs                  Ollama embedding client + cosine similarity
  chat.rs                    AI chat (Ollama / OpenRouter) with RAG context
  text_extract.rs            Document text extraction (PDF, DOCX, XLSX, etc.)
  dev_server.rs              Axum HTTP bridge for dev/testing (debug builds only)
  icons.rs                   Freedesktop icon → base64 data URI resolution
e2e/                         Playwright e2e tests

Data Storage

File	Purpose
~/.config/burrow/config.toml	User configuration
~/.local/share/burrow/history.db	Launch history (SQLite)
~/.local/share/burrow/vectors.db	File content embeddings (SQLite)