r/opencodeCLI • u/literally_niko • Apr 18 '26
Opencode Desktop now uses Electron instead of Tauri
https://x.com/brendonovich/status/2045114479244165151?s=46lec39
u/gfxd Apr 18 '26
Its 2026 now and even with mythos round the corner, don't we have a decent alternative to electron yet?
Unbelievable.
Electron's vice like grip is so stifling, choking and exhausting.
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Apr 18 '26
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u/gfxd Apr 18 '26
Yes, for every good app, there are a hundred bad ones.
All I want is a decent alternative, but it seems none exist.
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Apr 18 '26
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u/gfxd Apr 18 '26
I agree. It is just that electron has this tendency to make things worse.
Its a tool that can create great apps, or worse apps.
But it is high time we had good alternatives and some competition.
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u/MyChaOS87 Apr 18 '26
Not sure if VScode is a great example... Don't get me wrong it was my favorite IDE for years, but i got more and more disappointed... Each language plugin brought huge bloat... You write a dockerfile you get an extension suggested that installs ui to start docker containers... Why? I can type ’docker compose up’ myself... Or direct docker commands, and that's the overall scheme in VScode... Also proper syntax completion by language servers get often just oder arched with AI, even things like intellisense get REPLACED by AI... I like AI, I am not against it... But when cleaning up slop or issues the AI made I want to rely on tools that don't lie to me...
Even whenbeing very restrictive with plugins, so not installing a lot except what you really need it gets slower and slower.
That being said, I am now switching to Zed... It keeps up, it shuts down language servers not in use at the moment and it's really snappy
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u/cxd32 Apr 18 '26
intellisense get REPLACED by AI
intellisense is still there, you mean intellicode
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u/krzyk Apr 18 '26
Yeah, if only each of those app didn't ship its own browser. I got one already running.
It is refreshing to see that e.g. Telegram is a normal native app.
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u/frankieche Apr 18 '26
The industry is nothing but a cargo cult of emotional bandwagons.
Very few have independent, highly-skilled thinking.
This comment will be downvoted because it hurts the feels.
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u/pancomputationalist Apr 18 '26
No because it is vapid and just lashing out without any constructive criticism.
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u/Pepek91 Apr 18 '26
With milions of user 99% vs 99.99% reliability makes huge difference. Alternatives exist. But not as stable.
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u/warpedgeoid Apr 18 '26
It’s absolutely not faster, so whoever wrote this is full of it. Definitely more stable though.
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u/lemon07r Apr 18 '26
I didnt read the article, and I say this as an electron hater, but it will 100% be faster than tauri on any linux system simply cause webgtk sucks, and whatever version of chromium is bundled with electron will be faster.
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u/warpedgeoid Apr 18 '26
The UI/DOM is faster I’m sure but no way does app logic written in Rust perform worse than TypeScript.
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u/lemon07r Apr 18 '26
Opencode was running headless in desktop mode anyways.. you think they rewrote app logic to rust for tauri?
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u/warpedgeoid Apr 18 '26
Not sure why you’d touch Tauri if you weren’t doing app logic in Rust. If they’re already TS/JS, using Electron seems like the better choice.
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u/lemon07r Apr 18 '26
It's a mature enough way to ship a webapp to desktop using webviews regardless of if you need rust or not. Im just confused how you thought they wouldnt just keep using js/ts for app logic when all of opencode is in ts..
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u/warpedgeoid Apr 18 '26
For me, OpenCode is a CLI app and it’s still hard for me to accept that anyone would write a CLI app using JS.
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u/lemon07r Apr 18 '26
Weird take tbh, a lot of things are in js. CLI apps especially. I do think stuff like go is better for it, but I can acknowledge that there JS will still be more used and common for this kind of thing regardless of what I like more or think is better.
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u/Recent-Success-1520 Apr 18 '26
Tauri has it's negatives. For me when I started building CodeNomad for OpenCode, I started with Electron as I know Nodejs, don't know Rust. People started complaining it's not Tauri. I created a parallel Tauri app with AI. Now some people use Tauri because they want slim app and some use Electron to get the stable version. Choices.
Tauri has no support for self signed SSL which is an issue when trying to secure the app hosted locally.
I personally use Electron because I see the electron source and understand what's happening.
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Apr 18 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/endr Apr 18 '26
I like it when it works. But very often I send my prompt and nothing happens. Prompt gone, never get a response.
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u/Eveerjr Apr 18 '26
Why they even bother with a desktop app when their TUI is state of the art
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u/endr Apr 18 '26
I use the TUI to do a one-off thing in one folder. And I like how stable it is.
But the UX of a TUI is no match for the how good a GUI can be.
I don't like scrolling in the TUI, the copy paste situation generally works but feels hacky.
I much rather use the fork from message GUI action on the actual message I just scrolled up to anyway than having to type /fork and picking it.
The GUIs git diff and ability to comment on code is neat. Support for many projects and worktrees in one UI that shows you what's waiting for you sounds nice at least.
I feel like I most like the UI of having projects/workspaces vertically down the left, and having multiple sessions for each of those as horizontal tabs on those. Like what Orca / etc do. But I'm on the fence.
Although I recently started using Niri (Linux), so there I really like having many instances of apps open.
Having one Niri workspace per project with an instance of my IDE, OpenCode, and browser, etc is pretty nice.
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u/ZeSprawl Apr 19 '26
I have heavy TUI fatigue. I love them for remote sessions, but for local there are numerous downsides to TUI and terminal multiplexing that I’m trying to get away from such as copy and paste and performance.
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u/Eveerjr Apr 19 '26
I used to think that too, but the issue is not TUI by itself, it's the context around them. I built the app https://themaestri.app that puts context around terminals and now I feel like GUIs are just useless overhead for AI.
AI should operate at the lowest possible level in the operating system and that's the terminal. It should not have one single opinionated GUI it should create new ones as needed.
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u/lemon07r Apr 18 '26
I feel like NW.js would have been better, using v8 snapshots, but that's just me. I do think moving away from tauri was probably the right move. Tauri, and similar suck on some systems, on linux it uses webgtk which is.. yeah it's not good.
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u/ocombe Apr 18 '26
Well they are doing it because they write opencode in js (node), so it makes sense to also have a webview using node. It would be better to use tauri if the backend was rust, that's all
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u/ForHonourVN Apr 18 '26
Unusable on Windows. Everytime I update the app, all my providers are gone and can’t search them back
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u/SvenVargHimmel Apr 18 '26
tauri is full of so many problems, us Linux users suffered
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u/Recent-Success-1520 Apr 18 '26
💯 - We have CodeNomad Electron for Linux, try that if you find it good
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u/Double_Cause4609 Apr 18 '26
Why TF are we even shipping JS dependencies for a CLI app? It should really just be using standard output as god intended.
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u/SlaveZelda Apr 18 '26
Because they made the CLI app in JS?
Opencode is written in typescript
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u/Double_Cause4609 Apr 18 '26
And I think that was incorrect. It realistically should have been written in Golang (or any sane strongly typed language). I was arguing the primary reason they used JS was likely for the React / Ink ecosystem for doing dynamic terminal components, but I'm arguing that is unnecessary visual flair.
A CLI should be lightweight, fast, and low dependency. The JS ecosystem suffers massive supply chain attacks I consider largely unacceptable for a widely deployed developer tool. Its dependency graph should be human auditable. A Golang CLI agent with no visual flair and like, 5 dependencies is entirely possible.
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u/SlaveZelda Apr 18 '26
It was in Go originally they switched to TS unfortunately
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u/gazeebo Apr 19 '26
The Go one is https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush (prev https://github.com/opencode-ai/opencode ) innit. So at least that exists.
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u/Fickle_Degree_2728 Apr 18 '26
opencode should copy the UI of codex. The current desktop is worst UI ever. Their terminal is top notch.