DreamCoder v0.8.0-beta.1

A pre-release of the Electron desktop app. Windows has not been tested on real machines yet; reports are welcome in the Windows testing issue (#188).

Changed

• The desktop app runs on Electron instead of Tauri (#174). The interface now renders in Chromium on every platform. On macOS, long sessions are much faster: laying out a streaming reply takes about 1 ms per update instead of about 20 ms (265 ms at the slow end), and scrolling up through 1,000 messages no longer stalls. The installers are larger: the macOS .dmg is about 150 MB instead of 46 MB.
  • Install the new version by hand, as before. On Windows it installs to a new folder, so uninstall the previous DreamCoder from Settings → Apps afterwards.
  • Sessions, providers and settings carry over. The window position and portable mode start fresh, and so do the preferences the old window kept in its own storage: theme, interface language, zoom, sidebar width and open tabs. Set up portable mode again in Settings → General.
  • On Windows and macOS the title bar areas still move the window; the empty middle of the sidebar no longer does.
• The terminal runs in the local server (#173). Each terminal is a shell the DreamCoder server starts, so it behaves the same in every desktop build. Closing a terminal tab or quitting the app ends its shell. The terminal is available only in the desktop app, not on the H5 page.
• Building from source no longer needs Rust: bun run electron:install, bun run build:sidecars and bun run electron:dev in desktop/ (see CONTRIBUTING).
• Context windows beside each model (#105). In Settings → Providers each model has its own context window field next to its name. Fetching models fills empty fields with the window the provider reports and never replaces a typed or saved value.
  • Providers whose model list includes a context length, such as OpenRouter and Kimi, need no extra requests. Ollama, LM Studio, DeepSeek and Qwen are looked up from their own model APIs.
  • The form can be saved only after the current settings have loaded. If they fail to load, the form says so instead of saving over them.
• Auto-compact at 90% of the context window (#105). Long conversations are compacted at 90% of the model's context window, after the room kept for the summary, instead of about 33K tokens before it is full. A 1M model now compacts around 882K tokens instead of 967K, and a 200K model around 162K instead of 167K. Settings → General → Auto-compact sets a different percentage for every session. The provider form no longer has "Unknown Model Fallback Window": despite its name it replaced the window of every model of the provider when deciding when to compact. A value saved there is dropped.
• Typing in a dialog no longer lights up the dialog's whole border; only the focused field is highlighted.

Fixed

• Opening a memory file from a chat link no longer shows "An unexpected error occurred" when the file does not exist yet. The memory page selects the project and shows that it has no memory files.
• The close button of the settings window no longer covers the buttons at the top right of a settings page, such as Add Provider.

Install

The installers are not code-signed yet.

• macOS (Apple Silicon): open the .dmg and drag DreamCoder to Applications. On first launch macOS blocks the app; open System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway. If macOS says the app is damaged, run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/DreamCoder.app and open it again.
• Windows x64: run the -setup.exe. If SmartScreen appears, click More info → Run anyway.

Both installers are installed, launched and checked automatically in CI before release. Reports from real machines are welcome in issues.