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.

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)
• 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?

Astrolabe is a free open-source project built by a Ukrainian in Kyiv, Ukraine. If you're thinking of donating, I should be transparent about where that money actually goes - it doesn't go to me or the project. It goes to something I care about much more. Right now, while I've been building this passion project, there are people I know - my relatives, friends, colleagues - who took arms and joined Ukraine's Armed Forces. They're defending their country against Russian invasion. Most of them were civilians before this. They're still civilians, really, just doing something they had to do. I feel deep gratitude to them. So my goal is to support these brave people however I can.

You might wonder if the military really needs donations. The honest answer: yes. The government and Ministry of Defense cover basics, but when you're on the frontlines, every small thing matters. Better equipment, better protection, better conditions - these things can make a difference between life and death.

If you have concerns about donating to the military: I get it. Not everyone is comfortable with that for various reasons, and I respect that. The good news is that many of the organizations below also run humanitarian projects for civilians affected by the war. So you have options.

Thank you for considering this.

Oleh Omelchenko