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Show HN: I rebuilt the only parts of my IDE I use, in Rust, over a weekend (github.com)

50 points by kyle-ssg ↗ HN
I don't know Rust.

Friday after work I realised that 90% of my IDE time now is just the commit/diff view — and even good IDEs feel heavy for that.

So over the weekend I built a dedicated native tool for just that. Kyde is a macOS git commit + diff editor with one goal: be fast, do Git well.

I'm curious whether anyone else mostly opens their IDE for git operations these days.

It's open source, and there's a signed app in Releases.

22 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 43.6 ms ] thread
smt88
The primary value of IDEs in the agentic era are: debugging, code review (with good diffing), and management of the agent’s context. I also use mine for browsing databases, but not everyone does that.

You seem to have one of those three. I’m not sure what your coding background is, but debuggers/profilers are incredibly useful and important, and it’s essentially malpractice for a developer never to use them.

asadm
This is amazing and I will use this! Does it support git submodules? I like how VSCode divides changes into buckets across all git repos in current workspace, I can commit each separately from one sidebar.
spiralcoaster
Actual title: I had Claude code up a diff tool in Rust over the weekend

My guess is this made it to the front page solely from the Rust boost.

satvikpendem
This is basically what the agentic apps do already right? Like Codex, Claude Desktop, Copilot etc. Except with those I can also write commands to the AI as well as review their output all in one app rather than multiple.
mathieudombrock
Why would you choose to have the ai use a language you don't understand? Isn't this basically admitting you had nothing to do with this project and anyone else could pay an ai to make the same thing easily?

Is this something you expect other people to use?

Are you planning to maintain this?

Are you making a point about ai capabilities?

Is this just a joke?

I guess I don't really understand the point of posts like this.

danielrmay
What might you build when you let Claude take care of commits? :-)
achandlerwhite
Forced dark theme -- please don't punish me for having astigmatism--can't do dark mode
Maledictus
great idea! this use case is the only reason left why I start VS codium.
sshine
I like how it looks.

But the terminal already has excellent diff and commit tools.

propstober
bro rly could have just made a custom nvim setup
tmaly
What models and tools did you use to create this?

What were your biggest challenges in making this?

iberator
You didn't wrote this. Generating code from AI is NOT programming.
xtracto
Pretty good, and I think I could definitely use it. One thing that I immediately missed is syntax coloring. For Markdown and other known extensions. I am sure it will be trivial to add it.

Another possible useful feature would be to add "open in system" or similar in the right-click menu for a file, to open the file with whatever application the OS has bound to it.

EDIT: I see there's a plugin thing that when clicked installs the highlighting. Cool!

EDIT: Also missing is selectively staging lines of a changed file to commit. I would actually change the behaviour of the Git UI so that it matches the VSCode one, to reduce the learning curve. Most people already know how that works, no need to make them learn a new UX.

sajithdilshan
Ignore all the negative comments, this is really cool. Looks a lot like a JetBrains IDE. One suggestion is to integrate claude code as a code editing window tab rather than a terminal window. If you'd like checkout https://github.com/sajithdilshan/agent-cli-plugin on how I did it for JetBrains IDEs as a plugin
asadm
Ignore the people being negative about vibe-coding. These are either boomers or just insecure/afraid for their own jobs.
darksim905
I'm with the other comments here, but what's the deal with the '120 fps scrolling' blah blah blah? This clearly isn't a game or movie -- why are we talking about frames?
kyle-ssg
Hey, I should have maybe made this more clear - I definitely don't care that it's 120fps more that the frame rate doesn't drop and we aren't seeing freezes. Initially the project was, with large files, with syntax highlighting especially or switching very large branches. The built-in FPS counter actually proved really helpful in observing these.
gamblor956
The code is...quite bad...

It seems the AI coding is just the software version of Temu. Lots of cheap stuff but none of it is very good and it breaks pretty easily when you try to do anything outside of a very very small list of uses.

kyle-ssg
Hey, have you got any fundamental examples of why? I get pessimism towards AI, I've battled against using it after programming for so long, but I do intend to keep building on this and I'd genuinely appreciate things you saw that are icebergs.
zuhsetaqi
Would you mind supporting Intel Macs?
claudiacsf
Oh man, that's a great idea. Well done.