Searchlight – Open-source Postgres client for macOS
Hi HN, Over the past year, I’ve been building a native MacOS Postgres client for my personal use. While there are plenty of existing clients, I built this because: - No open-source Postgres client matched the smooth UX of tools like Sequel Pro/SequelAce (for MySQL). - I missed the satisfaction of long-term product ownership and iteration—recent work has me jumping between projects. - I’ve been using Postgres more lately and wanted to get hands-on to deepen my knowledge. I also wanted a playground to experiment with client features that would help me on day-to-day. Some I have…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, Over the past year, I’ve been building a native MacOS Postgres client for my personal use. While there are plenty of existing clients, I built this because: - No open-source Postgres client matched the smooth UX of tools like Sequel Pro/SequelAce (for MySQL). - I missed the satisfaction of long-term product ownership and iteration—recent work has me jumping between projects. - I’ve been using Postgres more lately and wanted to get hands-on to deepen my knowledge. I also wanted a playground to experiment with client features that would help me on day-to-day. Some I have implemented already: - Hover over a foreign key column to see the linked record in a popover. - Autocomplete lookup for foreign key records when inserting/editing rows. - High-level stats pop-up when hovering over a column. - Contextual “sugar” features (e.g., UUID fields include a button to generate a UUID while editing). - On update/insert failures, it tries to highlight the issue on the problematic column, vs some generic error alert. It’s still very bare-bones and I still use it alongside other tools for features I haven’t implemented (management features for tables/schemas/user), but I’m already using as my main client for 90% of what I work on. I’m sharing here to get early feedback. Mostly trying to determine if more people find value in this project if I keep developing it. ps.: I’m using my personal Apple developer account so I can’t notarize the app with Apple. If you try to install from the GitHub releases page MacOS will warn that it can’t verify the developer identity, so you will need to approve the install on Settings > Privacy, or build from source.
Does the same job
all alternatives →- PA
Hasura: Native Postgres Integration2022 · ▲118Instant GraphQL backend with Hasura & Neon in under 2 mins
- AFAI-first PostgreSQL client for MacApr 2026 · guillim.github.io · ▲7
"Can you check if this user is on the premium plan?" "I have a support ticket on Mr.Bean, saying he cannot login... Can you have a look?" "How many subscriptions did we have today?" ... As senior SWE at Twenty.com (open source CRM), I had these quite often. Every day I needed to check something in Postgres, I had to wait 30 seconds for DBeaver to load or fight pgAdmin's UI. So I built Paul. Yes our database configuration has too many schemas (3000 schemas) for those clients, but still, it was not Postgres fault. Only the client that couldn't handle it. Paul is a native macOS app, light…
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