PopAsk

A desktop AI assistant that supports quick questions from selected text or screenshots, multiple APIs, OCR, and customizable shortcuts.

Features

• AI Chat: Default service, custom OpenAI API Key, Bianxie, OpenHub, and more
• Shortcuts: System-wide hotkeys (e.g. translate selection, OCR, open window only), configurable in Settings
• OCR: Screenshot-to-text via Tesseract.js with multi-language support
• Prompt templates: Built-in and custom prompts, bindable to shortcuts
• Chat history: Sessions and history persisted with Zustand + localStorage
• Settings: API Key, OCR languages, shortcuts, and prompt list management

Tech Stack

Layer	Tech
Desktop shell	Wails v2 (Go backend + native window)
Frontend	React 18, Vite, Ant Design, Zustand, Tesseract.js, react-markdown
Backend	Go (API calls, clipboard, screenshot, global shortcuts via gohook, window control)
Optional	Supabase Edge Function (server/supabase/functions/pop-ask) as default chat backend

Prerequisites

• Go: Match go.mod (currently Go 1.24)
• Node.js: 18+ recommended (frontend Vite/React)
• Platform: macOS / Windows / Linux
• Network required when using the default cloud service; optional for local/self-hosted API.

Install & Run

Install dependencies

• Frontend: cd frontend && npm install
• Go: go mod download (or let wails dev fetch them)

Development

From the project root:

wails dev

This starts the Vite dev server with hot reload. You can also open http://localhost:34115 in a browser to debug the frontend and call Go methods from devtools.

Building

Production build:

wails build

Common examples:

wails build -debug -devtools -clean -upx -nopackage
wails build -clean -upx

Output goes to build/bin (or Wails default); macOS produces a .app, Windows can produce an installer.

Configuration

Copy .env.example to .env and fill as needed:

Variable	Purpose
SERVER_URL	Self-hosted / default chat service URL
BIANXIE_URL / BIANXIE_API_KEY	Bianxie AI
OPENHUB_URL / OPENHUB_API_KEY	OpenHub

Leaving these unset uses built-in defaults; you can also set an OpenAI API Key in the in-app Settings to use a custom endpoint.

Project config: edit wails.json. See Wails project config.

Project Structure

.
├── app.go, api.go, prompt.go, shortcut.go   # App entry, API, prompts, shortcuts
├── clipboard.go, screenshot.go, window.go   # Clipboard, screenshot, window
├── config.go, service_base.go               # Config and service base
├── main.go, wails.json, go.mod
├── data/                    # Embedded prompts.csv, prompts.json
├── frontend/                # Vite + React frontend
│   └── src/
│       ├── components/      # ChatComp, SettingsComp, AskComp, etc.
│       ├── store/           # Zustand state
│       ├── utils/           # Utils and getPromptSelectOptions
│       └── wailsjs/         # Wails-generated Go bindings
├── server/                  # Optional: Supabase Edge Function pop-ask
└── build/                   # Platform build config and icons

Author

Michael Zheng — soymikey0717@gmail.com