A small Electron desktop app for recording tarot readings. Each reading is a session (title, date, deck, optional spread) containing a list of cards — each with a topic, a question, the drawn card, and orientation. A card's meaning is sourced (read-only) from that card's definition in the deck, and each reading has a free-form notes section for the overall interpretation. Readings can be imported from JSON (file or paste) — handy for bringing in readings authored elsewhere.
A deck builder (Decks tab) defines the decks: structure-agnostic, so it handles standard decks (Rider-Waite-Smith — seeded with full public-domain JPG art + card back), the Argent Tarot (an original-art deck on the Thoth structure, bundled under bundled/decks/argent/), the Empyrean deck (an original Thoth-adjacent deck with custom court ranks that ships with full 78-card WebP art plus a card back under bundled/decks/empyrean/), and custom ones like the Hybrasyl deck with an arbitrary number of major arcana and custom suit/court names. Each card can hold meanings, keywords, and an imported image, and a deck can have a card back (bundled art is served read-only and overridden by any image you import). Built-in decks carry a seedVersion, so a shipped deck update replaces the older copy on startup without disturbing your own decks. The recorder's deck field offers the builder's deck names.
A layout builder (Layouts tab) defines spreads on a visual board: drag positions to arrange them, name each slot, and mark crossing cards. Single Card, Three Card, Celtic Cross, and Horseshoe ship seeded. Picking a layout in the recorder auto-fills one entry per position and shows the spread diagram with the drawn cards.
Built with electron-vite + React + TypeScript + MUI, sharing the Hybrasyl theme system (Hybrasyl / Danaan / Chadul / Grinneal) used across the other Dark Ages tools.
- electron-vite (
src/main,src/preload,src/renderer) - React 19 + TypeScript
- MUI v9 with the shared Hybrasyl themes (
src/renderer/src/themes) - Cinzel / Cinzel Decorative / Crimson Pro fonts via
@fontsource
Readings, decks, and settings are stored as JSON under the local app-data directory, %LOCALAPPDATA%/Erisco/Corvath/ on Windows:
readings.json—{ version: 1, readings: Reading[] }decks.json—{ version: 1, decks: Deck[] }layouts.json—{ version: 1, layouts: Layout[] }settings.json—{ theme }decks/<deckId>/— imported card images, served to the UI via thecorvath-asset://protocol
Writes are crash-safe: each file is written to a .tmp sibling and atomically renamed over the primary, the previous version is rotated to a .bak.json, and a corrupt primary is automatically recovered from its backup on next load.
The disposable Electron cache (userData) lives in the same directory.
Corvath makes one request of its own. Corvath reads a small list of version numbers, versions.json in the public hybrasyl/cernunnos repository, from raw.githubusercontent.com. It does this 10 seconds after start, and each time you select Check for updates on the Settings About card. The answer tells you if a newer Corvath is available.
- The request is an HTTPS GET. It carries no personal data, no token and no identifier other than a
User-Agentofcorvath. - Corvath downloads no update and installs no update. The notice shows the version, and View release opens the release page in your browser.
- GitHub receives the request, as it does for a web page that you open.
- Your readings, decks, spreads and settings stay on your computer.
Until the first release of Corvath, the list has no entry for Corvath. At start Corvath then shows nothing, which is correct, and Check for updates says that the list has no entry for this app yet.
Report an issue sends nothing by itself: it opens a prefilled issue page in your browser, and you choose to submit it.
npm run dev # launch in development (HMR)
npm run build # type-check-free production build into out/
npm run typecheck # tsc for main + renderer
npm run build:win # package a Windows installer (electron-builder)Over RDP, Corvath drops to software rendering on its own. A remote session has no GPU, and Chromium's GPU compositing path is what makes window dragging lag and the app idle at about 10% CPU there. Corvath also turns off the panel blur of the four fantasy themes while software rendering is on, because that blur is expensive without a GPU. Nothing to set; Corvath reads the session type at launch.
It cannot see a reconnected session. Windows records the session type at logon and never revises it, so a console session that you later connect to over RDP still reports itself as local. If dragging lags over RDP, set CORVATH_DISABLE_GPU=1 in the environment before you launch. The same variable answers the other way: CORVATH_DISABLE_GPU=0 forces hardware rendering back on if the detection is ever wrong on your machine. Any other non-empty value means on.
Run the tools through npm (npm run dev, npm run build) — electron-vite is a local dependency and isn't on your PATH as a bare command.
If npm run dev builds but no window appears, check for a leaked ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE=1 in your shell (some Electron-hosted terminals set it). It makes Electron run as plain Node. Clear it and retry: Remove-Item Env:ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE; npm run dev (PowerShell) or unset ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE && npm run dev (bash).