About Astrolabe

Astrolabe is a lightweight, browser-based snippet manager for Vega-Lite visualizations. It's designed to help you quickly create, organize, and iterate on visualization specs without the overhead of a full development environment.

Everything runs locally in your browser—no server, no signup, no data leaving your machine. Your snippets and datasets are stored using browser storage, so they persist across sessions. As a Progressive Web App, Astrolabe works fully offline after your first visit and can be installed as a standalone application.

Key Features

• Three-panel workspace — Snippet library, Monaco code editor with Vega-Lite schema validation, and live preview
• Draft/published workflow — Experiment safely without losing your working version
• Dataset library — Store and reuse datasets across multiple visualizations (supports JSON, CSV, TSV, TopoJSON)
• Offline-capable — Works without internet connection after first visit; install as standalone app
• Import/export — Back up your work or move it between browsers
• Inline data extraction — Convert hardcoded data into reusable datasets
• Search and sorting — Find snippets by name, comment, or spec content

Getting Started

Keyboard Shortcuts

Storage & Limits

• Snippets — Stored in localStorage with a 5 MB limit (shared across all snippets). The storage monitor shows current usage.
• Datasets — Stored in IndexedDB with effectively unlimited space (browser-dependent, typically 50 MB+).
• Backup — Use Import/Export to save your work as JSON files. Datasets can be exported individually from the Dataset Manager.

Tips & Tricks

• Sort snippets — Use the sort buttons to organize by Modified, Created, Name, or Size. Click a button twice to reverse the sort order (⬇ becomes ⬆).
• Extract inline data — When editing a spec with inline data, click "Extract to Dataset" to create a reusable dataset automatically.
• Dataset references — Astrolabe resolves dataset references at render time, so you can freely switch between inline and referenced data.
• Search across specs — The search box looks inside snippet names, comments, and the spec content itself.
• Linked datasets — The metadata panel shows which datasets a snippet uses, and the Dataset Manager shows which snippets reference each dataset.
• URL datasets — Reference remote data by URL. Astrolabe fetches and caches it for preview, but the URL is what gets stored.

Privacy & Data

Your data stays yours. Astrolabe is built with privacy as a core principle:

• Local-first architecture — All snippets and datasets are stored in your browser (localStorage and IndexedDB). Nothing is sent to any server.
• No accounts, no signup — There's no authentication system, no user profiles, no cloud sync. Your work exists only on your machine.
• No cookies — Astrolabe doesn't use cookies or any persistent tracking identifiers.
• Privacy-friendly analytics — We use GoatCounter (privacy-focused, GDPR-compliant) to track basic usage patterns like "snippet created" or "dataset exported." We collect zero personal information: no snippet names, no dataset content, no IP addresses, no user identifiers. Just aggregate counts to understand which features are used.
• Data portability — Export all your snippets and datasets anytime as standard JSON/CSV/TSV files. No vendor lock-in.

What analytics we collect: Action types (e.g., "snippet-create", "dataset-export"), generic metadata (e.g., format types like JSON/CSV, counts like "5 snippets"). That's it.

What we DON'T collect: Snippet names, dataset names, actual data content, URLs, email addresses, or any personally identifiable information.

Why Donate?

If you are reading this, you probably found Astrolabe to be useful enough to support its creators. It is a free open-source project built in Kyiv, Ukraine.

This passion project of mine is possible because my relatives, friends, and colleagues took arms and joined Armed Forces to defend their country and loved ones against Russian invasion.

I feel deep gratitude to them, so I will humbly ask you to redirect your donations to the foundations - you'll find the links below.

Thank you for considering this.

Oleh Omelchenko