DevGo

Why a launcher

Decisions, and what they cost

Every one of these is recorded in the repository itself. They are here because a choice explained is worth more than a feature listed.

1. 01

   WSL never boots on launch

   Reading a WSL workspace whose distro is off would start the VM, so DevGo does not. It shows the last list, marked cached · WSL stopped, and only Refresh and opening a project are allowed to start a distro — because you asked. Its one wsl.exe call at launch is --list --running, which cannot.

2. 02

   Up in half a second, from cache

   The last known list paints before anything scans; the scan, the git pass and the GitHub lane come after, off the main thread. Measured on the machine it was built on, release build, five runs: window visible 435–588 ms after a clean quit, the first list on screen about 50 ms before the window. The script that prints the number ships in the repo.

3. 03

   The network is something you ask for

   The GitHub list is fetched when you press the button, never on launch, on focus or on a badge pass, and never on the UI thread. Live search — the one place a keystroke reaches the network — is off until you turn it on. This replaced an earlier rule of no network at all: managing GitHub by hand turned out to be the larger problem, so the promise became narrower and kept.

4. 04

   No token, no password of its own

   GitHub is reached through the gh you are already logged into, so gh auth logout signs out everywhere. Servers are launched by alias so your ssh config’s key and options apply; DevGo stores an alias, a host and a key path, and nothing else.

5. 05

   The server runs its own actions

   An action is typed into a tmux window on the server and the terminal attaches to it. sudo asks there. DevGo never holds a password, never runs a script itself, never parses what came back — and an action line never rides the terminal’s own command line, because cmd would parse it first. A launcher on a laptop cannot become the thing that has root on the box.

6. 06

   A cache that heals

   The last good scan of every workspace is kept. A drive still attaching at boot is retried three times and never overwrites what was known. A listing that errors part-way is marked unavailable, never shown as a shorter list — the cache only ever holds a complete scan. A config file that cannot be parsed goes to .bak and is left alone.

7. 07

   Every shortcut is declared once

   The handler, the footer hints, the menus and Settings › Shortcuts all read one table in src/shortcuts.ts. A binding cannot drift out of step with its label because there is only one place for it to be.

8. 08

   A contrast contract, enforced at build

   Every text token is at least 4.5:1 on every surface it can land on, in every theme, and the lane hues sit at least 60° apart — checked by a script the build runs, so a theme that fails does not ship. Disabled is a token, not an opacity, so the gate can defend it too.

9. 09

   See-through is paid for only when it is on

   A window born transparent holds about 30 MB more than an opaque one — one 2560×1440 alpha surface in the process, the rest in WebView2’s GPU process — and transparency is a creation flag. So the window is created see-through only when the knob is above zero; from opaque, the knob takes effect at the next launch, and the panel says so.

10. 10

    A launcher is nobody’s child

    Whatever started DevGo — an agent’s shell included — what DevGo opens gets a clean top-level environment: no session markers, no NO_COLOR, no GIT_EDITOR=true. An agent launched from it is its own session, not a child of the one that launched the launcher.

11. 11

    Greyed with the reason

    A target that cannot open this project is shown disabled and says why — no WSL form, not found on Windows — rather than failing after the click. A Windows launch without psmux falls back to a plain shell and says so. Toasts are one sentence, with the fix where there is one.

12. 12

    Not features, on purpose

    No git operations beyond clone — no commit, push, diff or merge — no pull requests, no issues, no CI, no creating repositories, no second forge. lazygit and gh dash do those well; DevGo opens the folder.

13. 13

    Unsigned, and said so

    Builds are unsigned on both platforms and the README says exactly what SmartScreen and Gatekeeper will show. Each release is built by GitHub Actions from a v* tag, so the installer on the page is that tag’s tree and nothing more.

Everything you can type or press