Grok Desktop App — Design Concept
A visual harness over Grok Build · macOS 14+ · MIT
GrokHub is a visual harness layer that uses Grok Build’s connection in Terminal. Install Grok Build first. GrokHub finds that same CLI and session on your Mac — no API keys, no account picker, no path settings — and you are chatting with Grok in no time.
The built app is in this folder. Clone the repo, open Grok.app, and you are in.
Terminal is not a fair comparison to tools like Codex. Grok deserves a real desktop surface — rooms, a transcript, a composer — sitting on the official harness instead of a scraped TUI or a raw HTTP client.
That product is harder than it looks. GrokHub is early, and making it feel as complete as other agent apps has been a larger project than it first appeared. The source is open so people who care about this can help finish it. Updates already ship to everyone automatically.
Please be respectful, and only send changes you would actually want to run.
- Install Grok Build from x.ai/build, then run
grok loginonce in Terminal. - Open
Grok.appin this folder, or unzipGrok.app.zip. - Drag the app to
/Applicationsif you want it to stay. - The first time macOS asks, right-click the app and choose Open.
If grok already works in Terminal, the app connects to that same session. Chats stay on your Mac in ~/Library/Application Support/GrokHub. Nothing from another machine — accounts, logs, or paths — is baked into the binary or this repository.
Running copies watch this repo. When a newer build is published, a small blue down-arrow replaces the settings gear next to Search. Click it to download and restart. You can still open Settings from the Grok menu, or by right-clicking the arrow.
This is a product people launch, not a playground. Read CONTRIBUTING.md before you open a pull request.
The short version:
- Fork, branch from
main, keep the diff focused. - Do not commit chats, logs,
hub.json, or home-folder paths. - Contributors send source. Maintainers publish builds with
scripts/publish-update.sh. - After a build lands on
main, existing users pick it up automatically.
export DEVELOPER_DIR=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer
xcodebuild -scheme GrokHub -configuration Debug \
-derivedDataPath build \
-destination "platform=macOS,arch=arm64" \
ENABLE_DEBUG_DYLIB=NO
open build/Build/Products/Debug/Grok.appYou need macOS 14+ and Xcode. The app is unsigned for App Sandbox on purpose, so the harness can use the same filesystem, keys, and tools you already use in Terminal.
MIT © Logan Voss