is it possible to recreate OSX spotlight with comp...

# compose-desktop

[Kaanixir]

is it possible to recreate OSX spotlight with compose Desktops current capabilities, like dynamic window resizing and no window toolbar, global hotkey to invoke it etc..

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

That would be beyond compose - which is a UI toolkit - and in the realm of an app framework.

[Kaanixir]

couldnt we potentially mix it partially with native objC shared library native code that grabs the global hotkey and does other things compose couldnt reach at ? as a temporary solution. Maybe in the future compose desktop will try to support some of these

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

Sure, another library or the app itself can do native bindings

[Kirill Grouchnikov]

https://github.com/MayakaApps/ComposeWindowStyler had some promise, but the author quickly lost interest in it. You also need to track which exact APIs are available in which exact versions of each one of the supported platforms. That means that an otherwise stable (abandoned) library quickly stops working on newer versions of the specific OSs.

[Kaanixir]

msg fom a year ahead, it was slightly hard to achieve this, but I finally did it with simple compose (commonMain) APIs on desktop target 😄 it seems its not beyond compose at all !


animating desktop targets' window size is possible even with ease functions (fastoutslowin etc)/

also possible with transparent background window without a decoration, you can also toggle between a small island bar, and a full size window, you can also grab a global hotkey on OSX, and make it toggle & animate between screen sizes

demo:

Screen Recording 2025-06-14 at 10.11.32 pm.mov