Tauri, Not Electron

"Electron ships a whole browser in every app. Tauri borrows the one the OS already has. The lightness is the point."

The Bloat Dad Is Fleeing

Rekindle exists because general-purpose editors are heavy. So its shell can't be the heaviest option on the shelf. Electron bundles a full Chromium into every app — that's the ~150MB+ baseline before you write a line of your own, times every Electron app on your machine, each running its own copy of a browser. For a tool whose entire pitch is "lighter than what you have," shipping a browser per app would be self-defeating.

Borrow the Webview, Don't Ship One

Tauri makes the same move Rekindle makes everywhere else: borrow instead of bundle. Instead of shipping Chromium, it uses the webview the operating system already provides (WKWebView on macOS), and pairs it with a Rust core for native work. The binary stays in single-digit MB.

              Electron                 Tauri
Webview       bundles Chromium         borrows the OS webview (WKWebView)
Baseline size ~150MB+ per app          single-digit MB
Backend       Node.js                  Rust
Philosophy    ship everything          borrow what the OS already has

It's the same instinct as borrowing CodeMirror for the editing core — don't rebuild (or re-ship) the commoditized heavy thing when the platform already has one. Cinder made this exact call for the same reason; Rekindle inherits the stack near-verbatim, because family consistency is free.

No Electron Fallback "For Convenience"

The tempting betrayal is a footnote: "we'll add an Electron build too, just for convenience / wider compatibility." Don't. The lightness isn't a nice-to-have you can hedge — it's the thesis. An Electron fallback would quietly reintroduce the exact bloat the project exists to escape, and once it's there, it becomes the path of least resistance. Some invariants only survive if you refuse the convenient exception. This is one of them.

Code

Electron ships a browser; Tauri borrows one·text

              Electron                 Tauri
Webview       bundles Chromium         borrows the OS webview (WKWebView)
Baseline size ~150MB+ per app          single-digit MB
Backend       Node.js                  Rust
Philosophy    ship everything          borrow what the OS already has

# Same instinct as borrowing CodeMirror: don't re-ship the commoditized
# heavy thing when the platform already has one.

Exercise

Check the size of the Electron apps on your machine (Slack, VS Code, Discord, etc.). Each carries its own Chromium. Add them up. Now imagine each had borrowed the OS webview instead. That difference is the tax Rekindle refuses to pay — and the reason 'just add an Electron build' is a thesis-level 'no,' not a preference.

Hint

On macOS, look at the .app bundle sizes in Applications. A hundred-plus MB baseline that's mostly Chromium, repeated per app, is exactly the duplication Tauri's borrow-the-webview model eliminates.