Pake

Pake is a tool that wraps any website into a native desktop application with a single command. It solves the frustration of using web-based tools like ChatGPT, Notion, or YouTube in a browser tab — with Pake, you turn them into standalone apps that live in your Dock or taskbar, open instantly, and behave like real desktop software.

The key technical difference from alternatives like Electron (the framework behind apps like VS Code and Slack) is that Pake is built on Tauri, a framework that uses the operating system's built-in web renderer instead of bundling an entire Chromium browser. On macOS it uses WebKit, on Windows it uses WebView2, and on Linux it uses WebKitGTK. This makes the resulting app files about 20 times smaller than equivalent Electron apps — typically around 5 MB compared to 100 MB or more — and significantly reduces memory usage.

Using Pake is straightforward: you provide a URL and run a command, and it generates an installer (.dmg on macOS, .msi on Windows, .deb on Linux). The CLI tool also supports customizing the app icon, window size, and title. For users who do not want to set up a build environment, the project offers online building through GitHub Actions and also distributes ready-made packaged versions of popular services like ChatGPT, Gemini, Twitter, YouTube Music, Excalidraw, and DeepSeek.

Additional features include keyboard shortcut support, immersive full-screen windows, drag-and-drop support, and the ability to inject custom CSS to remove ads or change styling on the wrapped webpage.

You would use Pake when you prefer a specific web tool to feel like a proper desktop app. It is particularly popular for AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT.

The tech stack is Rust for the core application framework via Tauri, with JavaScript and TypeScript for the web layer and CLI tooling.