Tolaria, Rust, and Questions About What Makes a Mac App Feel Good to Me

Tolaria is a “A second brain for the AI era”. It’s a MacOS app that sits atop Markdown files, uses Git for backups, and is open source. It also runs on Linux. I wrote a similar version of this app for myself (named “Muellerpad” of course) so I was intrigued. I downloaded Tolaria, gave it a spin by importing the 2.5k Markdown files that make up my website to see how would hold up. It was surprisingly fast. The UI is an interesting blend of iOS and MacOS things, and I thought at first that it must be an Electron app. So I dug into the package to make sure and I was instantly surprised to see it’s only 23 MB. The app bundle had hardly anything in there - a couple of .js files and the executable. So it’s not Electron, or some other web based UI. But what is it? I’ll also mention at this point that it reminded me a bit of Zed. There was something about Tolaria’s window chrome that rhymed with what Zed is up to. So I go digging a bit on it’s GitHub page to find that it’s a mix of Rust and…