Chromium Relaunch As App

Small Manifest V3 extension that launches the current page in an app window by calling omarchy-launch-webapp "URL" through a native messaging host.

• src/ - strict TypeScript source for the extension and native tooling
• extension/ - unpacked Chromium extension
• dist/ - generated standalone native hosts and installer

1. Build the extension:

   mise run build

2. Install the native hosts for your browser:

   ./dist/install-native-host install chromium

   Supported values: chromium, chrome, brave, edge, vivaldi, all

3. Open chrome://extensions or chromium://extensions.

4. Enable Developer mode.

5. Click Load unpacked and choose extension/.

6. Pin the extension if you want one-click access.

The build creates three standalone executables:

• dist/relaunch-current-page-host
• dist/browser-urls-host
• dist/install-native-host

The installer copies the hosts to ${XDG_DATA_HOME:-~/.local/share}/chromium-relaunch-as-app/native-hosts and writes browser manifests beneath ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-~/.config}. The installed hosts include Bun and their production dependencies, so they do not require Bun, Node.js, tsx, or node_modules at runtime.

Install or refresh an existing installation:

./dist/install-native-host install chromium
./dist/install-native-host update chromium

Remove it:

./dist/install-native-host uninstall chromium

Use all instead of a browser name to target Chromium, Google Chrome, Brave, Microsoft Edge, and Vivaldi.

• The popup and page context menu only enable launching for http and https pages.
• Launching from the page context menu closes the current tab after the app window opens.
• In app-style windows, the page context menu flips to reopening the page in a normal browser tab instead.
• The extension uses a fixed public key in extension/manifest.json, so the unpacked extension ID stays stable for the native host.
• Open tab state is written atomically to ${XDG_STATE_HOME:-~/.local/state}/browser-urls.json for workspace capture tooling.
• Native host diagnostics are written to stderr. Stdout is reserved for Chromium's length-prefixed JSON protocol.
• Generated JavaScript under extension/dist/ and executables under dist/ are ignored. Run mise run check to lint, test, type-check, and rebuild them.