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helena 0.9.1 Desktop app · windows · macos · linux · open source · free

bartosz@idct:~/software/helena$ cat ABOUT.md

about

Helena is built and maintained by Bartosz Pachołek at IDCT.

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 megabytes on disk) and store collections in formats that do not diff cleanly. Helena makes three deliberate trade-offs in the other direction:

  • Native, no Electron. Fyne renders the interface through OpenGL; the binary is about 35 MB and starts instantly.
  • Open Collection YAML. Plain files that diff and merge like any other source code, so a collection lives happily in your repository.
  • Boring, debuggable Go. No JavaScript sandbox to babysit, no fancy dependency injection framework and no exotic concurrency: the whole runtime can be tested with go test.

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

How it is built

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

The author

Bartosz Pachołek

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 through the contact form or in the Helena Discord.

Get involved

  • Star or fork the project on GitHub. The build is just make build.
  • Report bugs or ask for features in the issue tracker, including "this was confusing" reports.
  • Ask questions and share ideas in the Discord.
  • Send a pull request: CONTRIBUTING and HUMANS.md cover the build and test setup and the project's invariants. Every change ships with tests and docs.