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 React, and it’s built with Node somehow. Oh, and it appears to only have been in active development since February?

That’s crazy fast development (and obviously AI did a lot of the coding).

The developer, Luca Rossi, has a write up on it with the following statistics: 100K lines of code, in Rust + React. 1900+ commits, 3000+ tests.

That’s incredible for something that’s been in development for such a short period of time.

I wrote a little bit about Zed last year:

Zed fascinates me for some reason, and I can’t quite pin down why. Is it because of the hardware accelerated text rendering? Is it because it’s crazy fast? It’s written in Rust? Some combo of those and other things? Beats me, but I think Zed is cool.

I find that Tolaria is giving me the same feelings. There’s something here about how it’s developed that I can’t quite put my finger on, but it feels … good?

I think it’s the speed. There’s no needless animations. Things just flow. It’s fast fast fast and the tables scroll at 60fps on my M1 Mac.

But it’s also the UI. It feels like a direction that MacOS could have taken. There’s clear a delineation between the content and the chrome. The UI is subtle and doesn’t scream “look at me”. In a way, it’s a contemporary implementation of what Mac OS was 10+ years ago, or maybe even all the way back to Mac OS 9.

To be sure, there’s a lot of things that could be improved. It doesn’t feel quite native - but it gets so much closer to native than Electron apps do. And I certainly like this Rust + React direction a lot better than the 300 MB+ Electron apps that are being foisted on us these days.

I want to dig into it more, but I think there’s something here. In my mind it feels more native to the Mac than Apple’s Messages and Contacts apps do. And that really excites my developer mind.