Caret launches open-source Cursor rival

Caret’s strongest pitch is making a Cursor-like workflow inspectable, local-first, and materially lighter at the native-shell level. The ambitious feature surface is impressive, but the project is still early and needs broader validation across platforms.

• –Tauri and the system WebView reduce packaging overhead; the project reports a 30 MB binary and 110 MB Rust core, though the full process family reaches roughly 490 MB.
• –Ollama support covers chat, autocomplete, and embeddings, giving developers a practical zero-cloud path.
• –MCP, memories, rules, checkpoints, background agents, ACP integrations, and sandboxed shell execution make this more than a thin editor wrapper.
• –Windows and Linux builds are best-effort and currently untested, so macOS users are the clearest initial audience.
• –With only a handful of GitHub stars and no published releases, expect rough edges despite the Cursor-class feature ambitions.