Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

$1,500 an hour and still using the software my grandma used to make bingo fliers!?

Hi HN! I'd like to submit for your consideration Tritium (https://tritium.legal). Tritium aims to bring the power of the integrated development environment (IDE) to corporate lawyers.

My name is Drew Miller, and I'm lawyer admitted to the New York bar. I have spent the last 13 years in and out of corporate transactional practice, while building side projects in various languages using vanilla Vim. One day at work, I was asked to implement a legal technology product at my firm. Of course the only product available for editing and running programs in a locked-down environment was VS Code and its friends like Puppeteer from Microsoft.

I was really blown away at all of the capabilities of go-to definition and out-of-the box syntax highlighting as well as the debugger integration. I made the switch to a full IDE for my side projects immediately. And it hit me: why don't we have this exact same tool in corporate law?

Corporate lawyers spent hours upon hours fumbling between various applications and instances of Word and Adobe. There are sub-par differencing products that make `patch` look like the future. They do this while charging you ridiculous rates.

I left my practice a few months later to build Tritium. Tritium aims to be the lawyer's VS Code: an all-in-one drafting cockpit that treats a deal's entire document suite as a single, searchable, AI-enhanced workspace while remaining fast, local, and secure.

Tritium is implemented in pure Rust. It is cross-platform and I'm excited for the prospect of lawyers running Linux as their daily driver. It leverages a modified version of the super fast egui.rs immediate-mode GUI library. The windows build includes a Rust COM implementation which was probably one of the more technical challenges other than laying out and rendering the text.

Download a copy at https://tritium.legal/download or try out a web-only WASM preview here: https://tritium.legal/preview

Let me know your thoughts! Your criticisms are the most important. Thank you for the time.

Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust
tritium.legal

Agreed! I don't think lawyers would have accepted an Electron alternative to super fast Word. Rust gives the raw speed and safety necessary to compete.

It's my first Rust project, and I've found Rust to be amazing once you cross over the learning hurdle. The biggest issue was of course the borrow checker, but for a project like this where you aren't really iterating much on the design (as opposed to say a game dev), it lets you fly. It saves you from all the big mistakes and allows you to comfortably use threads and things. No idea how I would have made it without rust_analyzer, though.

Egui was simple to get going, while it has some downsides being an immediate mode UI, those are mostly overcome by the caching necessary for rendering documents, etc.

It probably wouldn't make sense to show lawyers what we do, either, but there's a kernel of truth there: the product needs some development on the onboarding.

Yes! From scratch. It started with a docx library but had to be re-implemented from the beginning because that library dropped data that wasn't implemented. Tritium's docx implementation is more permissive such that it can gracefully failover to just pure XML if it can't parse an element via the AST.

Spent 15 seconds waiting for the spinner to resolve before I gave up.