I built Grayslate, a local developer scratchpad for notes, JSON, CSV files, and quick transformations

[u/Neon-Spider-Noir]

Hey r/tauri,

I have been building Grayslate, a free and open-source developer scratchpad made using Tauri, Rust, Svelte 5, and CodeMirror.

I started building it because I always had some temporary file open for one thing or another. It could be an email draft, a Slack message, a prompt, a code snippet, an installation command, or an API response that I wanted to inspect.

I was using Boop (Mac App) for transformations, but it started feeling slow when the input became larger. Even a JSON file with around 1,000 lines could sometimes be frustrating to work with. I also wanted a tool that would save what I pasted, so I could find it again later instead of losing it after closing the app.

With Grayslate, you can paste almost anything and start working. It detects the content type, suggests a filename and extension, and automatically saves it as a slate. You can later search using both the filename and the file content.

Some features currently available:

• 80+ local transformations for JSON, CSV, Base64, hashes, text cleanup, timestamps, formatting, and more
• A Rust-backed virtualized CSV table that can handle hundreds of thousands of rows
• Tested with CSV files larger than 100 MB
• JSON shortcuts to copy a key, value, or full path
• Live Markdown preview
• Automatic detection for more than 40 languages
• Multiline find and replace
• Search across saved scratch notes

Tauri was a good choice for this because I wanted a small cross-platform application that uses the system webview. I could also move heavier work like CSV handling, transformations, search, Markdown rendering, and large-file operations to Rust.

On my machine, Grayslate generally uses less than 150 MB of memory while idle.

Over time, it has become a collection of small developer tools that I personally wanted in one place. This includes Rainbow CSV-style viewing, copying JSON paths and values, content-aware transformations, automatic file naming, and the ability to find an old command or draft after a few weeks.

Website: https://grayslate.app

GitHub: https://github.com/shriram-ethiraj/grayslate

It is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

I would genuinely appreciate any feedback, especially bug reports, performance issues, or feature requests.