Comment by dugmartin

I've switched to building VS Code extensions for my local-first personal side projects. The reason: no server to run and all my data is in plain text so I can put it in source control.

I've built and use a time tracker, a double entry accounting system (using a Beancount(ish) syntax) and an activity tracker. Two of the three of those were using older CLI code I wrote a few years ago adapted into an extension.

Adding a webview that tracks the content of a tab is pretty simple. It also gives me the excuse to write parsers (some of my favorite code) which allows me to render the text into a data structure that my webview code (in my case React) can render on each keystroke. I don't get fancy, I parse the full buffer on each keystroke and with proper React state management the DOM updates are optimized.

I don't think I'll ever open source or publish the extensions themselves as they are too specialized for what I need and want but I may (if I have time) generalize the webview + tab change/rename/delete/close tracking code into an open source library.

I'd recommend this approach if it fits with your side projects. Its an easy way to get a web gui for your ideas without adding to the graveyard of broken domain dreams.