I Ditched Electron for Tauri v2: Building a 6MB Native-Feeling Clipboard Manager in React & Rust

I used the Paste app on macOS for years. It was the kind of utility you don't notice until it's gone. When I switched to Windows as my daily driver, the built-in Win+V clipboard manager felt like an absolute toy — it has a 25-item limit, zero search capabilities, and completely wipes your history after a reboot. I looked for alternatives, but they were either visually stuck in 2005 or felt like heavy sysadmin tools. So I built Beetroot — the clipboard manager I actually wanted to use. I refused to use Electron. A background utility should not eat 300MB of RAM just to render a list of strings. I went with Tauri v2 . The backend (database, OS hooks, OCR) is written in Rust, and the frontend is React 19 + TypeScript . The resulting installer is just ~6 MB , and it idles at around 30–50 MB of RAM. Building a desktop app with web technologies often gets a bad rap because of sluggish UIs. But if you build it right, it can feel 100% native. Here are the engineering decisions that got me there