SayRat

An open-source, ultra-lightweight keyboard launcher for desktop power users — instant cold-starts, near-zero input latency, and a sandboxed WebAssembly plugin ecosystem, all aimed at a sub-20 MB total memory footprint.

SayRat is Wayland-first and dual-process by design: a long-lived background daemon owns state, indexing, and Wasm plugin orchestration, while an ephemeral overlay client renders a frameless Slint window and forwards keystrokes.

Architecture

+--------------------------------------------------------------+
|                     sayratd (Daemon)                         |
|  - Lifecycle / State Engine      - Background Indexer        |
|  - Wasmtime Plugin Sandbox       - redb / fjall Database     |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
                               |
                               | [IPC: interprocess + postcard]
                               v
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
|                    sayrat-ui (Client)                        |
|  - Slint Declarative UI          - Input Capture Only        |
|  - wlr-layer-shell Overlay       - PagedResultModel          |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+

(Source: AGENTS.md §1.)

Workspace layout

Crate	Kind	Role
crates/sayrat-protocol	lib	Shared IPC types exchanged over the local socket.
crates/sayratd	bin	Background daemon: state, indexer, Wasm host.
crates/sayrat-ui	bin	Slint overlay client + keystroke forwarder.

Build & run

Requires a current stable Rust toolchain (1.85+ for edition 2024).

# Format + lint + build everything
cargo fmt --all -- --check
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo build --workspace --release

# Run the Phase 1 stubs
./target/release/sayratd   --version
./target/release/sayrat-ui --version

./target/release/sayratd   --socket /tmp/sayrat.sock
./target/release/sayrat-ui --socket /tmp/sayrat.sock

Each crate also builds independently:

cargo build -p sayrat-protocol
cargo build -p sayratd
cargo build -p sayrat-ui

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. Every source file carries an SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-or-later header.

For AI contributors

AGENTS.md is the governing reference for architecture boundaries, the approved technology stack, memory budgets, and code-style constraints. Read it before opening a PR; CI will reject contributions that violate the rules listed there.