A small Windows application meant to help you while you write. Think of it as a "power thesaurus." Summon an overlay which uses your clipboard to generate text suggestions. Uses Gemini 2.0 Flash to generate suggestions.
Quickly make text snippets more formal, get synonyms, generate taglines, and more.
This project uses ocornut/imgui to create the interface. glfw and Dav1dde/glad for OpenGL stuff. cpr to make http requests and nlohmann/json to parse them. Outfit font designed by Smartsheet Inc, Rodrigo Fuenzalida. Additional credits to Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview 03-25 for some contributions and general help.
Go to the latest release page and look for a LatentWriter-vX.X-x64.zip under assets. Download the zip and extract it somewhere you want to keep this program.
You'll need an API Key from Google AI Studio to use this application. You can grab one here: https://aistudio.google.com/app/apikey
Copy the key and launch LatentWriter.exe. Hit ALT+Q, paste the API key where required, and save settings. Enjoy! Next time you're writing and need some quick suggestions, copy the relevant text snippet and open the overlay to quickly ask Gemini for some suggestions.
2025-05-02.11-28-56.mp4
This project has been configured to work with Visual Studio. It uses vcpkg to download some dependencies and MSBuild to compile code.
Switch the Solution Configuration from Release to Debug to see debug statements get logged to a console window that will launch alongside the application.
main.cpp contains the application state along with all the OpenGL setup stuff. graphics.cpp contains the shader related code. gui.cpp is responsible for creating imgui windows and geminiAPI.cpp is responsible for making the API calls to Gemini. It also contains the prompts that get sent to Gemini.
Fonts are stored in ./fonts and are copied to the output folder as part of the build process.
Should I ever come back to this project there are some things I would like to remind myself of:
I should test this on a fancy retina high DPI 360hz 4K monitor whenever I get one.
This program currently uses your clipboard to generate suggestions, but I would have liked for you to have been able to select text and have the program automatically send a CTRL+C keystroke for it to appear in the program. Closing the overlay would restore your original clipboard. Couldn't get it to work, seemed like a Windows security thing.
The Full Desktop Overlay option makes the window alignment stuff behave a little weird if one of your monitors has a different resolution from the rest.
I would've liked to add bloom and other stuff to the shader. graphics.cpp would need a rewrite or otherwise it would be too messy.
You can find some extra notes here if you're wondering about the considerations that went into making Latent Writer: https://github.com/Zyplos/LatentWriter/blob/main/REPORT.md
I also wrote something that is tangentially connected to this project. You can read it here: https://zyplos.dev/ai