Tanka

A native macOS wrapper for g.tanka.ai — the Tanka work app as a proper desktop client with menu bar presence, dock badge, and system notifications. Forked from tw93/Pake.

Homebrew install: brew install --cask yousiki/tanka/tanka.

Internal project, macOS only.

Install via Homebrew

brew install --cask yousiki/tanka/tanka

Because we don't pay for an Apple Developer ID, macOS will refuse to launch the app until you strip the quarantine xattr. The cask prints this instruction in its caveats; run it yourself after install:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Tanka.app

Install from a downloaded DMG

Download the latest .dmg from Releases, drag Tanka.app to /Applications, then:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Tanka.app

What you get

• Loads https://g.tanka.ai/ in a native WKWebView. Login persists.
• Red-X hides the window instead of quitting; the app stays alive in the menu bar and continues to receive notifications.
• System notifications for new messages (bridged from the site's Notification API into UserNotifications).
• Dock badge with unread count; menu bar tray icon changes when there's unread activity.
• Click the menu bar icon to toggle the window.
• Cmd+Q or the tray menu → Quit actually quits.

Building from source

Requires:

• macOS 13+ (Ventura) to build with current Xcode. The shipped .app runs on macOS 12+ (Monterey), which is what the Homebrew cask's depends_on macos floor declares.
• Bun ≥ 1.1
• Rust toolchain (stable; rust-toolchain.toml pins the minimum)
• Xcode command line tools

bun install
bun run tauri build

Output: src-tauri/target/release/bundle/dmg/Tanka_*.dmg.

For a quicker local-dev build (unbundled, with devtools):

bun run tauri build --debug --no-bundle
open src-tauri/target/debug/pake     # the binary is still named "pake"

Releasing

1. Bump version in both src-tauri/tauri.conf.json and package.json.

2. Commit and push.

3. git tag v0.x.y && git push --tags.

4. GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/release.yml) builds arm64 + x86_64 DMGs and publishes a GitHub Release.

5. The cask in yousiki/homebrew-tanka updates itself. The release workflow renders tanka.rb from homebrew/tanka.rb with the real per-arch sha256 values, attaches it to the GitHub Release, and — if the HOMEBREW_TAP_TOKEN secret is configured — pushes it to the tap repo as Casks/tanka.rb with a commit message of the tag name. If the token is absent the step is skipped; the GitHub Release itself still succeeds and the tap can be updated by hand by downloading the release's tanka.rb asset.

   To enable the auto-update, create a fine-grained PAT with Contents: read and write scoped to yousiki/homebrew-tanka only, then add it as the HOMEBREW_TAP_TOKEN secret on yousiki/tanka.

Keeping in sync with upstream Pake

git fetch upstream
git log upstream/main ^main --oneline   # see what's new
git cherry-pick <sha>                   # for fixes we want

Prefer cherry-picking specific fixes over merging the whole upstream; our Tanka customizations are mostly in new files (src-tauri/src/app/unread.rs, src-tauri/src/inject/custom.js) but touch lib.rs, mod.rs, pake.json, and a few config files, so a full merge will conflict.

Architecture

See docs/superpowers/specs/2026-04-19-tanka-macos-app-design.md.

Credits

• tw93/Pake — the Tauri-based web-to-desktop scaffold that made this a weekend project rather than a month-long one.
• Tanka AI for the app itself.