// the find
nilbuild/pennywise
Cross-platform application to open any website or media in a floating window
Pennywise is an Electron app that pins any website or video into a small always-on-top floating window, meant for watching a tutorial or docs panel while you work in another app. It's aimed at anyone who wants a lightweight PiP-style browser window without a full second monitor.
The core idea is narrow and well executed: opacity control, per-window shortcuts, and auto-embed detection for YouTube/Vimeo/Twitch so you get a clean video frame instead of a full page. It ships prebuilt binaries for macOS, Windows, and Linux (plus a Homebrew cask), so most users never touch the source. 3.8k stars for a single-purpose utility says the use case resonates.
The README opens with 'Pennywise is not maintained' and points people to the author's new paid app instead — so any bug you hit is yours to fix or fork. The 'write tests' item is still an unchecked roadmap bullet despite a test/spec.js existing, meaning coverage was never real to begin with. It's an Electron wrapper with no update cadence, so expect it to fall behind on Chromium security patches. The Flash-plugin setup instructions in the README are a good sign of how old and unrevisited this codebase is.