A launcher for my left hand - Plumemu

I have always loved consoles. Somewhere along the way that turned into handheld emulators, and I have played them for so long that I can no longer count how many I have bought. I stopped trying a while ago.

It started with a few Anbernics and TrimUIs. Then came the Steam Deck, the Ayaneo 1S and the Ayaneo 2... Each one was good at something. But at some point I noticed that the one I picked up most was always the most compact one, not the most powerful one. So for the last few years I have only used Android handhelds. They fit in a pocket. You turn them on and you play.

I have a slightly odd habit. I like to control things and pick my games with my left hand. Turning the device on, scrolling the list, choosing a game, starting it: I want to do all of that with one hand. I also wanted the launcher to be really light. It is only the door into the game, so there is no reason for it to fight the game for RAM. There are many good launchers out there. I just could not find one that fit those two habits of mine. So I made one, and I called it Plumemu.

I like making small, detailed things. I can spend hours polishing one tiny piece, and that is my actual job. What I cannot do is write code. So in this project I am the one with the opinions, and Claude is the one with the keyboard. Plumemu is vibe coded. I describe what I want, and Claude writes and fixes the code. My part is to pick up my AYN Thor every day, use it, and report what feels wrong. Besides the Thor, I also test it on the Retroid Pocket 6, the Pocket Nova and the Pocket Classic. The first alpha came out on October 22.

A week later I posted it on r/AynThor, with the title "Plumemu: a launcher I made for my Thor". In the first lines I said plainly that I can't write code and that Claude wrote all of it. The post got around 14,000 views and 14 comments.

Some people were kind. One person asked if they could put it on their website. Another suggested I cut the color themes down to one to three really good ones, which, for someone who makes things for a living, is advice I should have given myself. But most of the conversation was about one thing: the source code. I had released the app on GitHub, but the repository only held images and translation files. The code was not there yet. One person asked why I did not just open all of it, since I had not written it myself. Another went into the repository out of curiosity, to see how good Claude's code was, found nothing to look at, and moved on. They still wished me luck.

The truth is, I had planned from the start to open the source once it was stable, the same way I did with torch-wiki and Quire Ink, two projects I made before this one. In my head it was simple. There was nothing secret in there. It was just a launcher on a game handheld. So I did not see a problem with waiting. Or, to be more honest, I had not thought about it much at all, until people on Reddit got quite heated about it.

I replied that since I am not a coder, I was not sure there was nothing personal left in there. I planned to ask a friend who knows code to look it over first, and open it in a week or so. I also said the code was still changing a lot, and I would open it once it was more stable. That reply went down to minus 13. Right below it, someone asked: if stability was the worry, why release the app first and not the source? "Shouldn't it be the other way around?"

I read that line a few times. I am still not sure I understand all of it. I did not come up through this trade, so there are processes, and things people in it take for granted, that I simply do not know. It could also be that some people did not like the vibe coding from the start, and the source code was just the place to say it. I do not know which one is true.

So I did what I had promised. I asked someone I know who can read code to look it over. He said he could do it next month. I thought about it for a while and decided there was nothing that important in there anyway. So I asked Claude to check it once more, and I opened it. If so many people think open source matters, then it probably does. And maybe one day, if I find the time, I should learn a bit more about code, so I can understand the process everyone was talking about.

As for the launcher itself. I started it on October 21. Ten days later, version 0.1.0 is build number 950. That means I reinstall it a few dozen times a day, pick it up, press around, and tell Claude what is still not right.

Most of my time goes into small details, the same way it does when I make a piece by hand. Take how the game list slides when you hold the button down. I had every list and every grid move the same way, 200 milliseconds a step, and tried it again on three devices until my thumb stopped noticing anything.

As for light: the download is 8.2 MB, it runs on Android 6.0, it opens a library of 10,000 games in about a quarter of a second, and it uses no CPU while it waits. Plumemu names your games offline, with no account. Setup takes two minutes, and it never touches your files. On the Thor, the bottom screen shows information about the game you are looking at. It works with both buttons and touch, and it comes in seven languages, Vietnamese included.

Since I cannot read code, the only way I know it still works is tests. Claude has written more than 6,000 of them to check its own work, and those tests now live next to the code.

Version 0.1.0 came out on October 31. It is the first stable release, and the first one that comes with its source, under GPL-3.0. The code is at github.com/joiha-steven/plumemu. If you have the time to read through it and you find something wrong, please open an issue there. I read everything.