Who's behind Helena

About

Helena is built and maintained by Bartosz Pachołek.

Named after Helena

Helena is named after our cat, Helena — a gentle tabby and our great friend for almost nineteen years. She passed away on the second day of Christmas, 2025. The app carries her name so that a little of her stays with us.

Helena the cat, stretched out and relaxed on a wooden shelf
Helena, a green-eyed tabby cat, sitting and looking at the camera

Why Helena exists

Most desktop API clients are capable, but they ship a browser engine inside their binaries (hundreds of MB on disk) and store collections in formats that don’t diff cleanly. Helena makes three deliberate trade-offs in the other direction:

  1. Native, no Electron. Fyne renders the UI through OpenGL; the binary is ~35 MB and starts instantly.
  2. Open Collection YAML. Plain files that diff and merge like any other source code, so a collection lives happily in your repo.
  3. Boring, debuggable Go. No JS sandbox to babysit, no fancy DI framework, no exotic concurrency - the whole runtime is go test-able.

When an abstraction would fight one of those trade-offs, the trade-off gets revisited before the abstraction gets added.

How it’s built

Helena is written in Go with the Fyne toolkit. The JavaScript scripting runs on the pure-Go goja engine. Where a protocol needs crypto the standard library omits - like MD4 for NTLM - it’s implemented from the spec and pinned to published test vectors rather than pulling in a dependency. Every behaviour-affecting change ships with tests and docs, and the non-UI packages hold a 90% coverage floor.

The author

Bartosz Pachołek IDCT - idct.tech

Helena is a solo project by Bartosz Pachołek at IDCT — designed, built, and maintained by one developer, with a good deal of help from AI, and kept free and open source. The source lives on GitHub; say hello on the contact page or in the Discord.

Get involved

  • ⭐ Star or fork the project on GitHub.
  • 🐛 Report bugs or request features via the issue tracker.
  • 🤝 Contribute - see CONTRIBUTING and HUMANS.md for the build/test setup and the project’s invariants.

Download Helena View source