SideX – A Tauri-based port of Visual Studio Code (github.com)

Good. I’m glad. It’s a great editor but the whole electron backend is so bloated.

[dead]

What a world we live in where 200mb RAM usage for a text editor is considered "lightweight".

Would this also support the whole plugin infrastructure?

Quoting from the README:

> The entire VSCode workbench - editor, terminal, extensions, themes, keybindings — ported to run on a native shell.

but also

> Many workbench features are stubbed or partially implemented

So which is it? The README needs to be clearer about what is aspirational, what is done, and what is out of scope. Right now it just looks like an LLM soup.

Vibe coded UI translation with a conflicting README and no screenshots? Is this what it takes to get onto HN front page?

> Same architecture, native performance ... Goal: 200mb RAM usage.

But Tauri doesn't have native performance, specifically when it comes to RAM!

> Memory benchmark might be incorrect: Tauri might consume more RAM than Electron > https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/issues/5889

Awesome project. How much work is left, are you looking for contributors? I just built very basic IDE on mobile for myself. I thought about forking vscode but it felt too heavy and I only wanted a subset of features. Now I am wondering if I should use this project for the desktop version.

This is the kind of thing that looks simple until you actually implement it.

> Zero Electron imports remaining in the codebase

and you know that AI wrote all of it with minimal human supervision.

side note: last few days I noticed that vscode stopped leaking memory all over the place. when left idle it was taking all the ram I had + 20gb of swap space

and recently I noticed that I have half of the ram free.

I use insiders build btw, so stable might still not have those improvements

> Goal: 200mb RAM usage

This is why Zed is great but I just can't get used to the debugger experience so I end up back in VSCode.

I am not sure that their goal (<200mb ram) is really related to their approach (using a built in rendering engine for the same exact source material) at all.

[flagged]

The worst thing about Tauri is people gaslighting about it being more efficient. No you just save on 150MB of download and install size. And you trade that for risk of incompabilities and breaking. The last thing I want for an editor I use 8h a day.

I don't think it's worth it with the sheer amount of issues you will run into on Mac and Linux. There is a reason why lot of Tauri apps are being rewritten in Electron.

> Goal: 200mb RAM usage.

We've come such a long way from: "Eighty Megs and Constantly Swapping" :D

[dead]