Tinker – a lightweight WoW addon manager

tinker.lukeed.com

1 point·lukeed··4 comments

After a 10y hiatus, I got sucked back into WoW Forever I went to Curse to find some old familiars and was appalled that the macOS client was over 600MB! This must have been why I managed addons manually a decade ago…

But searching and managing a directory’s contents is super straightforward. So Claude & I threw together Tinker, a 25MB cross-platform* desktop app that does what it’s supposed to, without any of CurseForge’s tracking & adtech runtimes.

You can login with & use CurseForge to sync your addons list — or just sync to a “tinker.json” file in a location that your Dropbox/iCloud/etc manages.

Fully free. No tracking. No ads. Happy gaming~

*I only tested on macOS but the others should work just as well. Please report if you try & find otherwise

Just my own two cents: the problem was never the lack of wow addon managers, it was the lack of long term maintenance. There have been some very excellent addon managers that have just petered out because ... they just do. For all the users and noise around an addon manager, it is typically a single person maintaining it indefinitely as a hobby.

I haven't updated it in a while but I imagine that, just as there is an explosion of new addons right now, there is probably an explosion of addon managers as well: https://ogri-la.github.io/wow-addon-managers/

Good luck

TIL — never thought to check. It’s a really straightforward task and shouldn’t require any maintenance until the next time blizzard changes folder location. Its only risk is if CF takes down their API, which would affect a lot more than just Tinker

That list defines “maintained” as updated within the last 12 months. Things can be done, working as expected, and not require an update. A few of those probably still work fine

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