SideX

SideX

VSCode's workbench, without Electron.

Why · What's Working · AI Agent · Getting Started · How It's Built · Contributing · Discord

SideX is a port of Visual Studio Code that replaces Electron with Tauri (opens in a new tab) — a Rust backend and OS's native webview. The same TypeScript workbench, the same editor, terminal, and Git integration, running without a bundled browser.

Early release. Core editing and the terminal are solid. The extension host and debugger are still in progress. See [What's Working](#whats-working) for the full picture.

Why

VSCode's memory useage is almost entirely from its bundled Chromium, not the editor itself. Tauri replaces that with the webview already on your system — WKWebView on macOS, WebView2 on Windows — shared across apps and costing almost nothing extra.

RAM savings are most tested on macOS, WKWebView is shared with Safari. On Windows the picture is more nuanced — WebView2 memory can look higher depending on how it's measured, and it's an active area in the Tauri ecosystem (opens in a new tab). The target is under 200 MB at idle on macOS. We'll publish real benchmarks once the app is stable enough for them to be meaningful.

What's Working

Solid:

• Monaco editor with syntax highlighting and basic IntelliSense
• File explorer — open folders, create, rename, delete
• Integrated terminal — full PTY via Rust, shell detection, resize, signals
• Git — status, diff, log, stage, commit, branch, push/pull/fetch, stash, reset
• Themes — multiple built-in themes from the VSCode catalogue
• Native OS menus (macOS, Windows, Linux)
• Extension installation from Open VSX (opens in a new tab)
• File watching, file search, full-text search, Rust-backed search index
• SQLite storage, document management (autosave, undo/redo, encoding)
• Built-in AI agent — chat, inline diffs, shell commands, multi-file edits; bring your own model provider, no account needed (see [AI Agent](#ai-agent))

AI Agent

SideX has a built-in coding agent, and it needs no SideX account of any kind — no sign-in, no identity provider, no hosted service in the path. Every request goes from the editor to a server running on your own machine, and from there straight to whichever model provider you point it at.

How it starts

On launch, the app spawns its own agent server (sidexai/sidex-server, written in Go) as a child process bound to 127.0.0.1 on a random free port. It's supervised from [src-tauri/src/server.rs](./src-tauri/src/server.rs) and stopped when the app exits. If the server binary isn't built, the rest of the editor still works — the chat panel just reports itself as disconnected.