curator

A dedicated, always-findable home for the browser tabs you can't afford to lose. macOS only.

Not a general browser: a minimal app (Tauri v2) that renders a curated, declarative set of "keeper" tabs from a config.toml config, and refuses to let new-tab navigation pollute that set — handing every such intent off to your macOS default browser instead.

Why

Important tabs (mail, calendar, dashboards) get buried in a sea of browser windows. Firefox pinned tabs are the closest workaround, but the pinned window itself gets lost and keeping it clean is constant manual work. curator gives keeper tabs a distinct, stable home that lives outside the window-pile and never accumulates cruft — curation is file-driven, everything else is ephemeral.

Model

• config.toml is the source of truth — each [[window]] block opens one window, containing loose [[window.tab]] entries and/or [[window.group]] sections of [[window.group.tab]]s. No in-app pin/unpin; you curate by editing the file (hot-reloaded on save).
• Multiple windows — each [[window]] opens its own window with its own tab list. All open at launch; ⌘W (or the red button) closes a window and the Window menu reopens it. Closing the last open window quits curator.
• Keeper tabs are home bases — wander within a session, then snap any tab back to its canonical URL with the sidebar's ⌂ home button (or by re-clicking the active tab); every tab also resets on restart.
• New-tab intents escape — target="_blank", window.open, cmd/middle-click all shell out to open, routing to your macOS default browser instead of opening in curator.
• Sessions persist, and are shareable — log into a site once in-app and it stays. By default every tab shares one login store, so signing into a provider covers its related services (Gmail, Calendar, …). Set a tab's (or a window's) session = "name" to give it a separate account; reuse the same name elsewhere to share that login. Logins follow the session name, so renaming a window or editing a URL never signs you out.
• Page-first chrome — the active page fills the content area under an overlay title bar; the traffic lights float over the top of the sidebar, which doubles as a window-move drag handle (drag the banner or an empty area to move the window; toggle with sidebar_drag).
• load_on_open keeps a tab live — mark a chat/service load_on_open and it loads at launch, stays live in the background, fires native banners, and rolls its unread count up to the dock badge. Tabs without it are lazy and stay quiet until you open them. That one per-tab flag is the only knob — no per-window modes.
• Dock badge aggregates across windows — the badge total sums unread across every window's loaded tabs.
• Window menu — close a window (⌘W); reopen any closed window from the Window menu. Closing the last open window quits curator.

Quick install

In Claude Code, run /curator:install — it checks prerequisites (offering to install any that are missing), builds curator from source into ~/.curator, installs curator.app to /Applications, and seeds your config.

Or install from a terminal:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Lockyc/curator/main/install.sh | bash

Re-running either path updates curator (git pull + rebuild). The steps below describe the manual / contributor flow.

Setup

1. Copy the sample config into place:

   mkdir -p ~/.config/curator
   cp examples/config.toml ~/.config/curator/config.toml

   It lives under ~/.config/ so it slots into a dotfiles workflow — your curated tab set becomes versioned, portable config.

2. Run it (requires Rust + the Tauri CLI; the installer backstops this via cargo install tauri-cli):

   just run      # or: cargo tauri dev

   just run loads the repo's examples/config.toml (via the CURATOR_CONFIG env var) so iterating never touches your real ~/.config/curator/config.toml. Point CURATOR_CONFIG at any file to test another config.

   just build produces a .app bundle; just deploy builds and installs/updates it in /Applications (quitting the running copy and relaunching). just test runs the Rust tests. The app icon source is src-tauri/icons/icon.svg — re-run cargo tauri icon src-tauri/icons/icon.svg after editing it.

3. Edit ~/.config/curator/config.toml and save — the sidebar hot-reloads, no restart. A malformed file keeps the last-good config running and shows an error banner instead of crashing. The Config menu has Edit Config / Reveal Config in Finder so you needn't memorise the path; the Tabs menu has Reload Tab (⌘R) and Reset All Tabs to snap every open tab back to its canonical URL.

Config

curator opens one window per [[window]] block. A window's tabs may be loose (ungrouped) or organised into groups; loose tabs render first in a headerless section, then each group:

# App-global options
# dark_mode     = true            # force dark appearance; omit = follow system
# allow_insecure = ["192.168.1.1"] # accept self-signed TLS for these hosts
# session       = "personal"      # app-wide default login store (bottom of the session chain)
# density       = "compact"       # "comfortable" (default) or "compact" (condensed chrome)
# sidebar_drag  = false           # drag the sidebar chrome to move the window (default true)

[[window]]
title         = "Keepers"          # required; must be unique across windows
# width       = 1500               # optional; default 1500 × 1000
# height      = 1000
# open_on_launch = "Grafana"       # true/false/"Tab Title"

  # Loose (ungrouped) tab — renders first, in a headerless section above the groups.
  [[window.tab]]
  title = "Start"
  url   = "https://duckduckgo.com/"

  [[window.group]]
  name = "Dashboards"

    [[window.group.tab]]
    title        = "Grafana"
    url          = "https://play.grafana.org/"
    load_on_open = true    # load at launch + keep live
    reload_every = 5       # auto-refresh every 5 minutes

[[window]]
title = "Comms"

  [[window.group]]
  name = "Chat"

    [[window.group.tab]]
    title       = "Mattermost"
    url         = "https://community.mattermost.com/"
    load_on_open = true     # kept live → fires banners + unread in the background

Per-window options

Field	Type	Default	Meaning
title	string	required	Window title; must be unique across all windows.
width/height	int	1500/1000	First-run window size in logical pixels. After that, curator remembers each window's size + position across launches, so this is only the initial default (move/resize a window and it reopens where you left it).
open_on_launch	bool | tab title string	false	true opens the first tab; a string opens the named tab; false = blank screen.
colour	#rgb / #rrggbb hex	none	Accent colour for this window — colours the title bar (nav pill + window name), giving each window a distinct identity.
session	string	none	Default login store for this window's tabs (overridden per tab). See sessions below.

Per-tab options

Each tab (loose [[window.tab]] or grouped [[window.group.tab]]) requires title and url. Tab titles must be unique window-wide (across loose + grouped); group names unique within a window. Optional:

Field	Type	Default	Meaning
load_on_open	bool	false	Load when the window opens and keep the tab live in the background, so it fires native banners and reports unread even when it isn't the active tab.
reload_every	positive int	none	Auto-refresh the canonical URL every N minutes.
session	string	none	Login store for this tab. Tabs sharing a value share a login (even across windows); distinct values are isolated accounts. Falls back to the window's session, then the app-wide top-level session, then the shared default. A blank or whitespace-only value is treated as unset and falls through the chain.

App-global options

Field	Type	Default	Meaning
dark_mode	bool	false	Force dark appearance so sites honouring prefers-color-scheme render dark.
allow_insecure	list of hosts	[]	Accept self-signed/invalid TLS certs for these hosts. Applied at launch (restart to change).
session	string	none	App-wide default login store — the bottom of the session chain (tab → window → this → built-in default).
density	string	comfortable	Chrome sizing: comfortable or compact (type + spacing scaled down proportionally for denser tab lists). Hot-reloads.
sidebar_drag	bool	true	Whether the sidebar chrome is a window-move drag handle (drag the banner/empty list area to move the window). false turns it off. Hot-reloads.
format_on_save	bool	false	Reformat config.toml in curator's house style on a clean hot-reload (same formatting as curator fmt). Leaves the file untouched if a reload fails to parse.

Run curator validate [path] to check a config without launching: it prints the resolved window/tab tree (each tab's cascaded session) and any non-fatal warnings (e.g. a URL repeated within a window), exiting non-zero on a parse/validation error. A bad config never crashes the app either — it keeps the last-good config running behind an error banner.

Tabs are lazy by default: a webview is created on first activation and kept warm for the session. Each row shows a green dot when its tab is loaded — click it to unload (free that webview's memory); the tab reloads on next click. A navigation pill at the top of the sidebar drives the active tab: ◀ back and ▶ forward through in-page history, and ⌂ home to snap back to its canonical URL.

See examples/config.toml for a two-window starting-point example.

Recipes

A few setups the model makes easy. All four compose freely — one window can mix them.

Same web app, multiple accounts side by side

Point several tabs at the same url and give each a distinct session. curator keeps the logins fully isolated, so you get parallel accounts of one web app — Matrix/Element homeservers, Slack workspaces, separate Google logins — with no incognito juggling. Mark them load_on_open and every account stays live and notifies at once.

[[window]]
title = "Matrix"

  [[window.group]]
  name = "Accounts"

    [[window.group.tab]]
    title        = "Work"
    url          = "https://app.element.io/"
    session      = "element-work"
    load_on_open = true

    [[window.group.tab]]
    title        = "Personal"
    url          = "https://app.element.io/"
    session      = "element-personal"
    load_on_open = true

A background notification hub

Keep alert and status pages load_on_open so they stay live, fire native banners on new activity even when curator isn't focused, and roll their unread up to the dock badge. Leave everything else lazy so only the pages you want live cost you a banner.

  [[window.group]]
  name = "Alerts"

    [[window.group.tab]]
    title        = "ntfy"
    url          = "https://ntfy.example.com/alerts"
    load_on_open = true

    [[window.group.tab]]
    title        = "Status"
    url          = "https://status.example.com/"
    load_on_open = true

An operator console for self-hosted infra

Collect the sprawl of admin UIs — hypervisor, NAS, DNS, reverse proxy, registrar — into named groups in one window. Give the window a colour so it's instantly recognisable, and let most tabs stay lazy and quiet; only the dashboards you watch get load_on_open.

[[window]]
title  = "Infra"
colour = "#0f8a8a"

  [[window.group]]
  name = "Network"

    [[window.group.tab]]
    title = "UniFi"
    url   = "https://unifi.example.com/"

    [[window.group.tab]]
    title = "Proxmox"
    url   = "https://pve.example.com/"

  [[window.group]]
  name = "DNS & Domains"

    [[window.group.tab]]
    title = "Cloudflare"
    url   = "https://dash.cloudflare.com/"

Homelab devices with self-signed certs

List the hosts whose invalid/self-signed TLS you trust in the app-global allow_insecure so their admin pages load without the browser security wall. Scope it tightly — only the hosts you actually run.

allow_insecure = ["10.0.0.1", "nas.local"]

License

MIT