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Introduction to Zenthyr

Introduction

Zenthyr is a Clojure library (plus a Leiningen template) for building desktop applications with a JVM backend and a modern web UI rendered inside a JCEF (Chromium) window.

The focus is a tight dev loop: generate a project, run lein run, and iterate with Vite hot reload while your Clojure backend stays in control.

Why Zenthyr?

  • Library-first: depend on zenthyr from your project.clj, keep APIs small and explicit
  • Modern UI: build your UI with Vite templates (React, Vue, Svelte, Angular)
  • Chromium rendering: JCEF window embeds a full-featured browser engine
  • Fast iteration: backend orchestrates Vite and opens a window to the dev server

Key Features

  • IPC uses JCEF’s cefQuery (CefMessageRouter), not WebSockets
  • Frontend bridge: window.zenthyr.invoke(message) and window.zenthyr.emit(message)
  • macOS-first window/process lifecycle (dock + close behavior implemented and validated on macOS)