All 42 Dependencies
Every package Zenbu.js depends on, ranked by repo health score.
Zenbu.js is an open-source TypeScript framework, built by Y Combinator-backed Zenbu Labs (P2026), for building Electron applications that are designed from the ground up to be hacked, extended, and modified by their own end users — not just their original developers. Instead of compiling and bundling an app into an opaque binary, Zenbu.js ships the raw, uncompiled TypeScript source alongside the packaged app. On first launch, that source is copied into a git-tracked directory on the user's machine (`~/.zenbu/<app-name>`), where it is watched, dynamically compiled, and hot-reloaded through Electron's Node.js runtime — in both the main and renderer processes.
Under the hood, a Zenbu.js app is composed of `Service` classes that run in the main process, expose their public methods to the renderer automatically over a type-safe RPC layer (the in-house `zenrpc` package), and read/write a reactive JSON database (`kyju`) that keeps every connected process in sync. The framework's most distinctive piece is `@zenbu/advice`, a custom Babel transform that rewrites every top-level function and binding in a plugin's source into an indirection table, so third-party plugins can intercept, replace, or "advise" running application code at runtime without restarting the process — the same mechanism that makes the framework's own hot reload possible is exposed to plugin authors as a first-class extensibility primitive.
Zenbu.js is the underlying engine for Zenbu Labs' own product, Zenbu, described in the repo as "a highly extensible development environment," but the framework itself is a general-purpose, standalone way to build any Electron app that wants this level of end-user hackability. The project is openly in alpha (per its own README and status badge) — Electron is the only supported runtime today, with Tauri, plain Node.js, and browser-native targets still marked as work in progress — and its API surface is expected to keep changing.
