Replace the Electron app with a native GPUI one

[killerwolf]

Rewrites QuickToss on GPUI — Zed's GPU-accelerated Rust UI framework — with GPUI Kit for components, and drops Electron, React, Vite, Tailwind and the npm tree.

The UX is deliberately unchanged: same three screens, same keys, same Trash-not-delete safety. settings.json is read from where it already lives, so anyone upgrading keeps their preferences.

Numbers

	Before	After
DMG	110 MB (×2 architectures)	6.0 MB (one universal)
Installed	341 MB	13 MB
node_modules	822 MB	—

Worth being explicit, and ADR 0002 now says so: that size win is a "stop shipping Chromium" win, not a GPUI win. Tauri would have landed in the same order of magnitude. What GPUI adds on top is no process boundary, no npm, no JIT entitlements, and rendering that doesn't drift with the OS's WebKit.

Previews are the substantive improvement

One call to QLThumbnailGenerator — the renderer behind Finder's Quick Look — replaces pdfjs, mammoth, SheetJS, JSZip and heic2any. Word, PowerPoint and Excel files get a real preview for the first time; a deck looks like the deck rather than a list of its text runs. Measured on real files:

Format	Time
HEIC (9–26 MB)	233–523 ms
PDF	29–108 ms
Video poster frame (170 MB .mov)	650 ms
PNG / text	0 ms (native decode)

This also isn't GPUI-specific — Tauri's backend is Rust too — but it's the change that most improves the app.

The regression

Video no longer plays. GPUI has no video element, and the only third-party player needs GStreamer installed system-wide, which a 13 MB app shouldn't demand. Video shows its poster frame, and a new O binding opens any file in the app that owns it. Tracked in #37, with a scrubbable-filmstrip approach sketched out.

videoAutoplay is dropped with it. The other two settings carry over.

Also in here

• Hardened-runtime entitlements gone. Signing needed allow-jit and allow-unsigned-executable-memory for V8 — precisely the exceptions that weaken the hardened runtime.
• Release pipeline off Node. electron-builder → scripts/bundle.sh (~120 readable lines). Icon generation no longer pulls electron-icon-builder and its deprecated phantomjs-prebuilt; qlmanage/sips/iconutil do it. Changelog extraction is now shell.
• One universal download instead of one per architecture, so the "which Mac do I have?" table is gone from the README and the landing page.
• react-pdf pinned at 6.2.2 because of Promise.withResolvers — that whole class of constraint stops arriving.

Verification

38 tests, clippy -D warnings and fmt clean, the bundled .app launches, the DMG builds. The Quick Look bridge is tested against real files rather than mocked, including that a missing file fails rather than hanging.

Not verified: the UI itself. Screen access wasn't available during the work, so the layout has never been looked at and no toss/keep/undo cycle has been driven through the actual interface. It compiles, launches and stays running — that's all that can be claimed. Please exercise it before merging.

Review notes

The diff is large but lopsided: ~12k insertions are mostly Cargo.lock, and ~14k deletions are mostly package-lock.json. The code worth reading is ~2,700 lines across app/src/, of which roughly 700 are tests.

session.rs, files.rs, settings.rs and update.rs are plain functions with no GPUI types in them — that's where the ported logic lives and where the tests point. ui.rs is the one file with no test coverage at all.

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