What It Means to Take Electron Out of VS Code

Visual Studio Code is a web application wearing a desktop frame. The frame is Electron, which ships a full copy of Chromium and Node.js with every app. That choice made VS Code possible on three operating systems. It also means the editor carries its own browser.

Ezhuthaani is my port of Visual Studio Code that replaces Electron with Tauri. The backend is Rust and the window is the operating system's own webview. The TypeScript workbench, the editor, the terminal, and the Git integration stay the same. The difference is that nothing is bundled to render them.

What Tauri changes

Tauri builds an application from a Rust core and a webview. On Windows the webview is WebView2, which is based on Microsoft Edge and therefore Chromium. Tauri's documentation notes that WebView2 updates itself, and that it is preinstalled on Windows 11. On older Windows versions the installer Tauri generates takes care of installing it.

So the engine still draws the editor. What moves is who owns it. In Electron the app owns a pinned Chromium and ships it. In Tauri the operating system owns the engine and keeps it current.

What the installer says

The v0.1.3 release of Ezhuthaani, published August 13, 2026, has two Windows installers. The setup executable is 12,499,923 bytes, about 11.9 MiB. The MSI is 16,457,728 bytes, about 15.7 MiB. Those are the actual published sizes of builds that contain an editor, a terminal, and Git integration, with no browser inside.

The trade

Any move off Electron trades one kind of cost for another. Electron gives one pinned Chromium version on every machine, so behavior is predictable and the download is large. A system webview gives whatever engine the machine has, so the download is small and behavior has to hold across versions the app does not control.

Everything the workbench used to ask Electron and Node for, such as windows, menus, files, and processes for the terminal, needs a path through the Rust backend instead. The editor surface is the part that stays TypeScript.

Where it stands

Ezhuthaani is at version 0.1.3 and ships as Windows installers from the ezhuthaani-releases repository. It is early. The claim I make for it is narrow: a VS Code workbench can run on a Rust backend and a native webview, and the installer comes out around 12 MB.