An app launcher for Windows and Linux that dials your programs like the SG-1 gate.
Type a program name, press Enter, and the gate dials it. The ring spins, seven chevrons lock one at a time, the kawoosh fires, and your program opens.
It is slower than clicking an icon. That is the point.
Both builds are on the releases page.
Windows: run the installer. Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit, nothing else to install.
Linux: download the AppImage, make it executable, and run it.
chmod +x Stargate-Command-*.AppImage
./Stargate-Command-*.AppImageThe Windows build is not code-signed, so it will show a blue "Windows protected your PC" box. Click More info, then Run anyway. A signing certificate costs a few hundred dollars a year and this is a hobby project. If you would rather not trust a stranger's binary, the source is right here and builds in two commands.
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| type | filter your programs |
| Enter | dial it, about 10 seconds |
| Shift+Enter | dial the full 28-second version |
| Tab | change speed, including an instant one |
| Esc | abort the dial, clear the search, or hide the window |
| I | open or close the iris |
| M | audio on or off |
| F5 | rescan for new programs |
| click glyphs | dial an address by hand on the DHD along the bottom |
| Ctrl+Alt+G | summon it from anywhere, rebindable |
Press MANAGE to hide entries you never launch, or to give one an address of your choosing with ADDR. Press + ADD for anything the Start Menu misses: a program, a document, a folder, a web link, or another machine.
Every program has its own address. The name is hashed into six constellations plus the Point of Origin, so it never changes. Photoshop is always Canis Minor, Perseus, Pisces, Capricornus, Lynx, Sculptor.
All 39 glyphs are the real ones, traced from reference artwork rather than drawn by hand, so the symbols on the ring are the actual constellations.
The chevrons light in the right order. They are not evenly spaced: 1, 2, 3 down the right, 4, 5, 6 back up the left, 7 at the top. Each symbol spins to top dead center to be grabbed, exactly as on screen.
You can dial by hand. The row of symbols along the bottom is a DHD: 38 keys, one per constellation, with DIAL in the middle. Press six of them and hit it, and whatever lives at that address opens. Get it wrong and the gate still locks all seven chevrons before telling you there is nothing there.
You are not asked up front how far you are dialing. Six symbols is a seven chevron address; keep going and an eighth makes it a nine chevron one, which is how you reach a remote machine by hand.
Or set your own. Press MANAGE, then ADDR on any entry, and choose the six symbols yourself. RESET puts it back to the derived one.
Remote machines get nine chevrons. Add one with a hostname or IP and it dials the full nine-chevron sequence before opening a remote desktop session, because seven chevrons is a local address and somewhere that is not your own machine deserves the long dial. Windows uses mstsc; Linux uses FreeRDP, Remmina or rdesktop, whichever you have.
The sounds are the real ones. Chevron locks, the ring, the kawoosh, the iris, the shutdown and the DHD keys. There is a synthesized version of each behind them, so deleting the sound files degrades rather than breaks it.
The iris works. It is a real leaf shutter, 22 blades, and the spiral falls out of the geometry rather than being drawn on.
Close it and the gate still dials perfectly, but nothing comes through and your program does not open. That is not a bug.
npm install
npm start # run it
npm run dist # build the installerWindows and Linux both build (npm run dist / npm run dist:linux). There
are no runtime dependencies beyond Electron itself: the glyph tracing, the
fallback audio and the PNG decoding are all hand-rolled.
It reads your Start Menu and Desktop shortcuts to build the program list, and pulls each program's icon. That is all it looks at.
It makes no network connections of its own. No telemetry, no update check,
nothing phoning home. You can verify that with a firewall, or by reading
electron/main.js. Settings live in %APPDATA%\Stargate Command on Windows
and ~/.config/Stargate Command on Linux, and survive an upgrade.
The one exception is the obvious one: a remote destination starts your system's Remote Desktop client, and that connects where you told it to. Nothing else does. Passwords are never stored or handled here either - the RDP client asks for them and your OS keeps them.
docs/DESIGN.md has the long version: how the glyphs were traced, why the iris is drawn the way it is, how Store apps are launched, and the Windows gotchas that cost real time.
Stargate, the SGC, the gate designs, the glyph artwork and the sound effects all belong to MGM. This is an unofficial fan project, made for fun, not affiliated with or endorsed by the rights holders.
The MIT license covers the code only. It is not mine to place any license
on the Stargate material in assets/ and public/sfx/, and it does not.
Linux support was contributed by @jkoehler11.
The sounds are optional as far as the program is concerned: delete
public/sfx/ and it falls back to the synthesized audio it shipped with
originally, which is built from oscillators and noise. Drop in your own seven
files under the same names and it uses those instead.