delphitools: eighty small browser tools that keep your files local

A collection, not a product

delphitools is a collection of over 80 simple, local-only tools that run in your browser, and every one of them solves a problem the author says they have personally had. It is implemented in Ember.js and styled with Crayon CSS. The tools are componentised and modular, and more are added on a regular basis. The homepage calls it the open source toolkit for digital creatives, and the repository description calls it a digital indie toolkit for computer touchers. That framing is the key to the project. This is not an application with accounts and a workflow; it is a shelf of single-purpose utilities, each of which does one thing, that happens to share a codebase, a visual language and a hosting setup.

The reaction to online tools, and the licence behind it

There is a rationale section, and it is the most quotable part of the README. delphitools exists as an answer to online tools that all do one thing, and not particularly well at that. It requires no logins, no paywalls, has no hidden features, no premium service and no social features, runs entirely in the browser and does not even require an internet connection to function. The licence choice is the same argument made legally. The project is developed under the Zero-Clause BSD licence and as such is freely available for modification and distribution. The Zero-Clause BSD is the most permissive of the permissive licences: it drops the advertising clause and the endorsement clause that the standard BSD carries, so you can take the code, change it and ship it without owing anyone a mention. All tools are completely open source and transparent.

What the categories actually cover

The inventory is grouped by category and the counts are in the headings. Audio and Video takes sixteen, from Audio Atlas and Audio Extractor through Auto Subtitle, Frame Extractor, Screen Recorder, Subtitle Converter and Subtitle Studio to Video Trimmer, Voice Recorder, Waveform Generator and the rest. Calculators has seven, including an Algebra Calculator, a Base Converter, a Graph Calculator, a Scientific Calculator, a Time Calculator and a Unit Converter. Colour has eleven, with a Blindness Simulator, a Contrast Checker, a Gradient Generator, a Harmony Generator, a Palette Extractor and a Tailwind Shade Generator. Dev Tools has nine, among them a Cron Builder, a JWT Decoder, a Regex Tester, a Request Builder and a UUID Generator. Images and Assets has sixteen, PDF has six, Typography and Text has eleven, Social Media has four, Other Tools has five, Print and Production has two, and there is a category the author has named Turbo-nerd Shit with five entries including a Braille Converter, IPA Transcription, Morse Code and NATO Phonetic.

The tools that touch your files

The Images and Assets group is the one that shows why local-only matters. It contains an Artwork Enhancer, a Background Remover, a Base64 Image Encoder, a Favicon Generator, an Image Clipper, an Image Compressor, an Image Converter, an Image De-skewer, an Image Splitter, an Image Stitcher, an Image Tracer, a Metadata Stripper, a Paste Image, a Placeholder Generator, a Substrata and an SVG Optimiser. A background remover and an image tracer are exactly the operations people are reluctant to hand to a web service, because the service keeps a copy of an image they may not want copied. The PDF group is similar in spirit, with Images to PDF, a PDF Compressor, a PDF Organiser, PDF Page Numbers, a PDF Preflight and a PDF Rotate and Crop. And the Audio and Video group covers a Screen Recorder and a Voice Recorder, which is the clearest demonstration that these run locally rather than relaying your microphone to a server.

Running it locally

The local installation is a clone and two commands.

bun install
bun start

That starts a local, Vite-based development server. The use of Bun rather than npm here is a choice worth noticing, because the package manifest's scripts are otherwise plain Vite and Ember commands: build is vite build, start is vite, and the static build is vite build followed by a prerender script. So the toolchain is Bun for the package manager and Vite for the dev server, with Ember as the application framework underneath, which is an unusual combination given that Ember ships with its own build tooling. The Ember CLI configuration file is present in the repository alongside an ember-cli-build.mjs, so the Ember parts are configured for a Vite pipeline.

Every tool has a verification script

The package manifest is mostly a verification harness, and that is unusual and interesting. Beyond the lint and format scripts, there is a verify script that runs a script per tool, with named entries for auto-subtitle, subtitle-studio, video-atlas, video-muter, video-trimmer, audio-extractor, audio-normaliser, cron-builder and http-status, and more following. Each of those is a separate Node script under a verify directory. The tooling also includes an ember-template-lint pass for the templates, a stylelint pass for css and scss, an eslint pass for the JavaScript, an ember-tsc type check with no emit, and Prettier for formatting. So each tool is checked by a script written for that tool, rather than by one generic test. That is what a project of many independent widgets needs, and it is the reason the scripts directory is as prominent as the application directory in the manifest.

The repository as a picture of the project

The top-level listing explains the shape. The app directory holds the application, with a subdirectory per tool under the componentised structure the README describes. There is a public directory with a heroes folder containing the wordmark image, an assets directory, a config directory, a scripts directory holding the verification and prerender scripts, and tests. The configuration files are numerous and specific: an .ember-cli file, a babel.config.mjs, a vite.config.mjs, an eslint.config.mjs, a tsconfig.json, and a set of lint and format configurations for Prettier, Stylelint, Ember templates and the project itself. There is a wrangler.jsonc file, which points at a Cloudflare Workers deployment, and a testem.cjs file for the browser test runner. The documentation is unusually substantial for a tool collection: DESIGN.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, AI-POLICY.md and ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md sit at the root alongside the README, and the AI policy file is a signal that the project has an explicit position on how AI tooling is allowed to contribute to it.

Other platforms and the version in the manifest

The README notes that if you are on a different platform there is a delphitools CLI written in Rust, plus an iOS version, with the CLI in its own repository. That is a sensible structure for a browser-first project: the same tools behind a native interface, and the web build as the reference implementation. The package manifest gives the current identity as delphitools-v2 at version 2.2.1, marked private, which means it is not published to a registry as a library. Its exports map is the interesting part: the root export points at the app directory, so the package can be imported as a namespace of components, and the tests directory is exported separately. The licence field records 0BSD, matching the Zero-Clause BSD the README describes, and the description field is still a placeholder, which tells you the manifest is treated as build configuration rather than as a published package description.

Editorial conclusion

Use delphitools when you need a converter or an editor for a file and you would rather not upload it to somebody else's server, because every tool runs in the browser and the project makes no network requirement at all. Do not expect a suite of polished products, because these are small utilities grouped by category, and the quality will vary with the contributor who wrote each one. Verify first that your file type is covered, since the categories are fixed at around eighty entries, which version you are on, since the package manifest names the second version of the project at 2.2.1, and how you want to run it, because there is a separate Rust CLI and an iOS version alongside the web one.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. 1612elphi/delphitools on GitHub
2. Issues
3. Project website
4. README