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Introduction

bunmaska is a drop-in Electron replacement built on Bun and system WebKit. Same app, BrowserWindow and ipcMain APIs - no bundled Chromium. Alpha.

You already know how to use Bunmaska, because it looks exactly like Electron. You write against app, BrowserWindow, ipcMain, ipcRenderer, Menu, dialog, clipboard - the names you’ve been typing for years. The difference is everything underneath:

  • Runtime: Bun, not Node.
  • Renderer: the system WebKit (WKWebView on macOS, WebKitGTK on Linux) - not a second copy of Chromium bundled into every app.
  • Native code: none. The whole framework is TypeScript calling the operating system through bun:ffi. Zero compiled native code, zero runtime dependencies.

The result is an app that downloads in ~16-23 MB instead of 150 MB+, and a native-module story that doesn’t involve node-gyp ever again.

The three things that matter

  1. No bundled browser. We don’t ship Chromium - your apps render on WebKit instead, so there’s no second browser engine baked into each one.
  2. Buildless native modules. A native module is a .ts file that dlopens the OS. No N-API, no electron-rebuild, no compile step. See Native Modules.
  3. Drop-in API. The module names and shapes match Electron’s, with a bunmaska/electron shim so you can point your existing imports at it. We cover roughly 70-80% of what real apps actually use, and we publish the gaps so you can check before you commit.

Status

It’s alpha. It genuinely works on macOS, Linux, and Windows today - real windows, the OS’s own WebKit rendering (system on macOS/Linux, a from-source WinCairo build bundled on Windows), Electron-style IPC with context isolation, menus, tray, dialogs, clipboard (incl. images), nativeImage, safeStorage, powerMonitor, and a CLI that packages real .app/.deb/.exe distributables (plus .dmg with a flag). A few APIs differ per platform - printToPDF/capturePage are macOS-only, and those two plus custom protocol:// are engine-blocked on Windows - and the parity matrix is honest about every cell. Some method-level corners are still being filled in.

If you’re evaluating it for production, read the word “alpha” one more time, then keep reading anyway.

Where to go next