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Embabel Worlds

Platforms
macOS Supported. embabel lands in ~/.local/bin, which macOS does not put on PATH — so the installer adds it to ~/.zshrc (or your shell’s profile) in a marked block, and uninstall removes it. Docker Model Runner is a Docker Desktop feature and optional: without it, embabel embeddings use hosted.
Linux Supported. Model Runner needs the docker-model-plugin package rather than a Desktop toggle. ~/.local/bin is usually already on PATH. embabel open uses xdg-open; on a headless box it prints the URL and opens nothing, which is the useful behaviour over ssh.
Windows WSL2 only — see below.

Windows, specifically

Section titled “Windows, specifically”

Run the installer and embabel inside a WSL2 distribution — Microsoft’s Linux environment for Windows — with Docker Desktop’s WSL integration enabled for it. Docker Desktop already uses WSL2 as its engine by default, so anyone running Docker on Windows almost certainly has it.

This is not Windows support so much as Linux support that Windows users can reach: the installer is a POSIX shell script and the CLI assumes POSIX paths, so neither runs in PowerShell. A native port would mean a PowerShell installer and a CLI that understands Windows paths — a piece of work, not a flag.

Two things that will bite otherwise:

  • Keep the appliance inside the Linux filesystem — ~/embabel/worlds, not /mnt/c/.... Crossing the Windows/Linux filesystem boundary is dramatically slower, and it costs most where it hurts most: realm checkouts, which a coding agent reads and rewrites in a tight loop. Clone your realms under your WSL home directory too, and point embabel realms link at that.
  • localhost forwards through to Windows, so http://localhost:11044 opens the console in an ordinary Windows browser. embabel open tries wslview for exactly this.

Two things that are macOS-specific by nature rather than by neglect:

  • Docker Desktop’s file sharing. embabel realms link warns when a path is outside the shared list, because such a mount resolves empty with nothing in any log to explain it. Linux has no equivalent restriction, so the check does not run there.
  • The Me app, the menu-bar sensor, is macOS today. The appliance itself runs anywhere Docker does, including a Linux server.