Building a Minimalist Twitter with Pake
Categories: Creation
Introducing Pake
Open Source: https://github.com/tw93/Pake
A simple tool for packaging web pages into lightweight Mac apps using Rust, built on Tauri. Currently supports WeChat Reading, Twitter, Yuque, RunCode, Witeboard, Flomo, Vercel, and more. The technical complexity is actually not high—just an attempt to use Rust for packaging web pages, an old idea in a new form. In fact, PWA/Electron is also very easy to use and convenient.
Pake is special because compared to traditional Electron packaging, it’s nearly 40 times smaller, usually around 2MB. Additionally, due to the underlying Rust Tauri framework, the performance is lighter and faster than JS frameworks, with much lower memory usage. It also implements common shortcut key passthrough, container communication, style injection, immersive windows, drag support, simplified usage flow, and other optimizations. It’s quite fun to play with. You can fork it and package whatever you like.
Here I mainly introduce the “minimalist Twitter Mac client” I’ve been tinkering with recently using Pake.
Minimalist Twitter
Using Pake combined with the open-source thomaswang/minimal-twitter style injection, it took about 1 hour to package a minimalist Twitter version that you might like. It’s still only about 2MB. Compared with the official app, it looks much more comfortable. It removes the clutter and optimizes many OCD-triggering experiences. The results are below.
Home
Detail Page
Personal Homepage
Tweet
Packaging Summary
| WeRead | |
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| RunCode | Witeboard |
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| Flomo | Yuque |
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Finally
Pake was actually a small project I created unintentionally. At the time, I was used to reading WeChat Reading on Mac and found that there was only a web version, so I packaged one myself. Later, many people came to ask how to do it, so I put the code on GitHub. The code is actually very simple, but the idea of using Rust for packaging was relatively new. Many contributors later participated in its development. I wanted to make it more perfect and easier to use than foreign paid Electron packaging tools, satisfying enthusiasts is enough.