Pebble

Menu-bar text-polish tool that rewrites your clipboard with a local Ollama model. One global shortcut, seven presets, zero cloud.

Pebble lives in your menu bar. Press Cmd+Alt+P anywhere on your machine and whatever's on your clipboard gets rewritten by a local LLM — fix grammar, make it concise, formalize for an email, convert to bullets, or sharpen a vague prompt before sending it to an LLM. Polished text replaces the clipboard. Cmd+V to paste.

Nothing leaves your machine. No accounts, no telemetry, no cloud API.

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Features

• 🪨 One global shortcut — Cmd+Alt+P (configurable). Works in any app.
• 🎛 Preset dropdown — Polish, Concise, Formal, Friendly, Fix typos, Bullets, Prompt enhance. Last selection persists across sessions and is what the global shortcut uses.
• 🔒 100% local — talks only to Ollama on 127.0.0.1. No cloud fallback.
• 🍎 Menu-bar only — no dock icon, no main window. Hides on blur.
• 🌍 Cross-platform — macOS (primary), Windows, Linux.
• 🧱 Tiny code surface — Electron + React + ~600 lines of TypeScript. Easy to fork and modify.

Requirements

• Node.js 20+
• Ollama running locally
• A chat-capable Ollama model (default: qwen3-coder:30b)

Install (from source)

git clone https://github.com/gashiartim/pebble.git
cd pebble
npm install
cp .env.example .env

# Pull a model — default is qwen3-coder:30b
ollama pull qwen3-coder:30b

npm run dev

Build a distributable

npm run build:mac      # → dist/Pebble-1.0.0.dmg
npm run build:win      # → dist/Pebble-1.0.0-setup.exe
npm run build:linux    # → dist/Pebble-1.0.0.AppImage

The .dmg is unsigned (no Apple Developer ID). Personal-install on macOS:

ditto dist/mac-arm64/Pebble.app /Applications/Pebble.app
xattr -cr /Applications/Pebble.app
codesign --force --deep --sign - /Applications/Pebble.app
open /Applications/Pebble.app

The codesign step is required on macOS 15+ — without it the embedded Electron Framework's ad-hoc signature mismatches the main binary's and the app refuses to launch (Library not loaded ... different Team IDs).

Configuration

All env vars are optional — Pebble has sane defaults baked in. Override in .env:

OLLAMA_HOST=http://127.0.0.1:11434          # default
POLISH_MODEL=qwen3-coder:30b                # any chat-capable Ollama model
PEBBLE_POLISH_SHORTCUT=CommandOrControl+Alt+P

Recommended models

Model	Size	Quality	Speed (M-series)
qwen3-coder:30b	18 GB	Best (default)	Fast
qwen2.5:14b	9 GB	Very good	Faster
llama3.1:8b	5 GB	Good	Fastest
gemma4:latest (8B)	9.6 GB	Good	Fast

Smaller models still work for short messages but lose nuance on longer rewrites and on the Prompt enhance preset (which depends on instruction-following discipline).

Usage

Global shortcut (the way most people use it)

1. Copy text in any app (Cmd+C).
2. Press Cmd+Alt+P.
3. Wait ~1–3 seconds for the "✅ Polished" notification.
4. Paste with Cmd+V.

The shortcut uses whichever preset you last picked in the panel.

Panel UI

Click the menu-bar icon to open the panel. Pick a preset from the dropdown, paste text in the textarea, hit ⌘↵ (or click the button). The polished result replaces the textarea content and is auto-copied to your clipboard.

Presets

Preset	What it does
Polish	Clean grammar and style, keep tone
Concise	Same meaning, fewer words
Formal	Business / client-facing email tone
Friendly	Casual, warm — Slack / team
Fix typos only	Minimal change, preserves voice
Bullets	Rewrite as a bullet list
Prompt enhance	Sharpen a vague LLM prompt

Adding your own preset is one append to src/main/presets.ts — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Architecture

File	Purpose
src/main/index.ts	Electron main: tray, panel window, IPC, global shortcut, notifications.
src/main/polish.ts	Ollama chat call with the selected preset's system prompt.
src/main/presets.ts	Preset definitions. Single array — first entry is the default.
src/preload/index.ts	Bridge: window.pebble.{polish, getPresets, quit}.
src/renderer/src/Polish.tsx	Preset dropdown + textarea + button.

Contributing

PRs welcome. Read CONTRIBUTING.md for the bar and the no-go list (no cloud LLMs, no Tailwind, no telemetry, etc.).

By contributing you agree to follow the Code of Conduct.

Security

See SECURITY.md for vulnerability reporting.

License

MIT — do whatever you want with it, just keep the copyright notice.