that's close but it uses Tauri, which maybe lighter than electron but we're still running an instance of a web browser/web view

There's a TUI application out there that might be up your alley, but I can't remember what it's called...

EDIT: There's one called Posting which seems to be the most popular: https://github.com/darrenburns/posting

https://github.com/LucasPickering/slumber is also a good TUI alternative

Yes, Tauri isn't that much different than Electron. I also bundles Node JS to power Yaak's plugin system, which makes it even more similar.

I think Electron gets a bad rep mostly because big companies use it to build low quality apps.

Tauri doesn’t bundle Chromium and Node. My app bundle is 10MB and it even bundles a sidecar binary in Go. A hello world electron bundle is 100+ MB.

Ya the bundle size is different for sure. The memory usage isn't far off though, since it's still a web app.

Why is webview a problem? I hear this a lot but not sure why (with the exception of gtk WebKit on Linux which has legit perf issues). We’re on web right now and I’ve never heard anyone complain hackernews is sluggish and that they want a native app instead (or rather 5 native apps minimum for the big OSs).

This is mostly the case because most solutions provide more than the bare minimum of DOM rendering and event binding that a web view originally entails. Once you "accidentally" ship an entire browser inside your app, you've opened up more vectors for vulnerabilities—such is the price of humanity's hubris in attempting omnipotence.

Then second aspect is the "well-hidden" JS runtime or the general dislike of Javascript, but this point has been explained by other commenters well enough.

> Once you "accidentally" ship an entire browser inside your app

That’s not needed. Generally there’s a webview available on the system of choice. All major platforms have it, including mobile and many Linux distros.

> vulnerabilities

Such as? I mean yes if you load remote content with local access to FS etc (although that’s not within the webview). But you don’t need to (nor should you).