The desktop app is here, for macOS and Linux

Bramble started as a browser extension, grew iOS and Android apps, and spent the whole time being asked one question more than any other: when does it get off the browser?

It already has. The desktop app has been quietly shipping for a few weeks now, and 0.6.0 is a good moment for it to say hello properly. macOS and Linux, Windows coming soon.

It is a beta, but with your feedback and support, it will reach 1.0 in no time. Everything below works and is in daily use, but the app is a great deal younger than the extension, so keep a backup and tell us when it does something funny.

Not a browser tab in a costume

It is a real app, and no, it is not Electron. You are not installing a second copy of Chrome to look after your passwords. The window is the same Bramble you know, but your vault and every bit of cryptography live outside the browser engine entirely, in a part of the app that a web page could never reach.

Here is what you actually get:

A panel over everything else. Cmd+Shift+Space (Ctrl+Shift+Space off macOS) and a search bar appears on top of whatever you were doing. Find a login, copy the password, fill it into the browser, or open it properly. Then it gets back out of your way.
It fills your browser. Pair the app with the Bramble extension once and the panel fills the page in front of you. Nothing leaves your machine, and the extension carries on working fine on its own if you never bother.
An always-on sync hub. Syncing needs two devices awake at the same moment, and two phones rarely are. A computer usually is. Leave it in the tray and everything else has something to sync with whenever it wakes up.
Backups that run while the vault is locked. Point it at an S3-compatible bucket or your own WebDAV server and it uploads an encrypted backup on your schedule, whether or not you unlocked anything that day.

Installing it on macOS

Grab the .dmg, open it, and drag Bramble to Applications.

Or let Homebrew do it:

brew install --cask bramble

Installing it on Linux

Debian, Ubuntu, and friends

curl -fsSL https://apt.bramble.sh/keys.asc | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/bramble-keyring.asc > /dev/null
curl -fsSL https://apt.bramble.sh/bramble.sources | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/bramble.sources > /dev/null
sudo apt update && sudo apt install bramble

Three commands rather than one, because they are three separate decisions: trust our signing key, let it vouch for this repository and nothing else, then install. You will not be offered a curl | sudo bash here and told it is convenience.

After that, apt upgrade carries Bramble along with the rest of your system. The APT route is x86_64 today; on arm64, take the .deb or the AppImage below.

One file, no package manager

The AppImage runs on most distributions, and it is the Linux build that updates itself in place.

chmod +x Bramble_0.6.0_amd64.AppImage
./Bramble_0.6.0_amd64.AppImage

There is an aarch64 one sitting right beside it.

`.deb` and `.rpm`, by hand

sudo apt install ./Bramble_0.6.0_amd64.deb       # or Bramble_0.6.0_arm64.deb
sudo dnf install ./Bramble-0.6.0-1.x86_64.rpm    # or Bramble-0.6.0-1.aarch64.rpm

Every artifact is on the release page, checksums included.

Nix and NixOS

nix profile install github:flythenimbus/bramble

Or nix run github:flythenimbus/bramble to try it without installing anything.

A word on updates

The .dmg and the AppImage keep themselves up to date. The package-manager routes leave that to your package manager, which is the polite thing to do, so apt upgrade picks Bramble up with everything else and the app does not nag you about it.

What it cannot do yet

Written down here rather than left for you to discover at an inconvenient moment: Touch ID unlock, passkeys, and KeePass import and export. All three already work elsewhere in Bramble, which is the good news and also exactly why they are conspicuous here.

Further out, and not built yet anywhere: auto-type into windows that are not a browser, and an SSH agent that serves the SSH keys your vault is already storing.

And Windows, which is on the way but not here yet. The browser extension works there today.

Everything else is where it has always been. The vault sits on your devices, syncs directly between them, and there is no server holding it and no account to sign up for.

Download it, or read the source. Questions welcome, as always.