The lightweight AI-oriented IDE.

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No Electron. No bloat. A GTK4 IDE written in C23, aiming at ≤128 MiO of RAM — and a conversation thread that renders 100 000 lines at 0,0 ms. Measured, not hoped.

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A tour of the UI

The interactive box, in three states. A request folds away, the decision always shows in full — green or red — and the answer arrives complete, white on black like a terminal. Nothing is ever truncated.

Your provider, with or without a key. OpenRouter, OpenCode Zen, HyperCharm and KiloGateway ship pre-wired — adding one is a single line. The form greets you either way.

Two menus, zero chrome. The tool preferences ride two clicks from the thread — modes included, plumbing excluded.

Quick install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Eric1212/SIEB-CodeDashBoard/master/install.sh -o install.sh
bash install.sh

Warning

The usual pipe-to-shell caveat applies: the script is readable — read it before running it. It never uses sudo and never installs anything: if dependencies are missing, it prints the package-manager command for your distro and exits. You run that command yourself, then re-run the script (or just make).

Installation

git clone https://github.com/Eric1212/SIEB-CodeDashBoard.git
cd SIEB-CodeDashBoard

make run   # builds, then launches — the one-shot way
# or, in two steps:
make       # builds ./cdb and the .mo catalogs
./cdb      # runs it from the build tree

# or, install system-wide — desktop entry + icons (needs rsvg-convert):
sudo make install     # then start CDB from the app menu; undo: sudo make uninstall

Non-Linux (Windows & MacOS)

Windows (WSL2)

WSL2 — CDB is a GTK4 app; run it like any GUI app under WSLg, the Wayland/X11 layer included in WSL2 (Windows 11 in-box, or the Microsoft Store WSL on Windows 10). First time with WSL? From an administrator PowerShell:

wsl --install            # WSL2 + Ubuntu (default); reboot, then pick a
                         # username/password inside the distro
wsl --install -d Debian  # any distro — wsl --list --online to browse

Debian on the Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9msvkqc78pk6 (publisher: The Debian Project).

From that Debian shell on, treat CDB exactly as on a native Debian or Ubuntu install — install.sh included, sudo make install too (WSLg even surfaces the desktop entry in the Windows Start menu).

MacOS (Homebrew)

Homebrew — build from source against Homebrew's GTK4 stack:

brew install gcc pkgconf gettext make gtk4 gtksourceview5 libadwaita \
  json-glib vte3 libsoup librsvg
make run   # builds, then launches — the one-shot way
# or, in two steps:
make       # pkg-config finds the kegs through PKG_CONFIG_PATH
./cdb      # no XQuartz needed: GTK4 renders natively on MacOS

GTK4 renders natively on MacOS — no XQuartz needed. Stop there: sudo make install is XDG/Linux-only — /usr is SIP-protected, and .desktop entries mean nothing there.

Dependencies

A C23 toolchain (gcc 15 recommended) and the GTK4 stack. The pkg-config names CDB looks for: gtk4, gtksourceview-5, libadwaita-1, json-glib-1.0, vte-2.91-gtk4, libsoup-3.0.

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install build-essential gcc-15 pkg-config gettext git \
  libgtk-4-dev libgtksourceview-5-dev libadwaita-1-dev \
  libjson-glib-dev libsoup-3.0-dev libvte-2.91-gtk4-dev librsvg2-bin

# Fedora
sudo dnf install gcc make pkgconf gettext git gtk4-devel gtksourceview5-devel \
  libadwaita-devel json-glib-devel vte291-gtk4 libsoup3-devel librsvg2-tools

# Arch
sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel gtk4 gtksourceview5 libadwaita \
  json-glib libsoup3 vte4 librsvg

Make

Target	What it does
make	builds ./cdb and the tools
make run	builds, then launches
make install / make uninstall	desktop entry + icons, or remove them
make asan	AddressSanitizer + UBSan build
make check	test suite
make pot / po / mo / i18n-check	translation pipeline: regenerate, merge, compile, verify
make clean	sweep the build tree

Debug

CDB_DEBUG=1 ./cdb   # dump allocations + theme at startup

Documentation

Build targets live in the Makefile; the translation workflow, in po/README.md. The source under src/ is the final reference.

Contributing

Found a bug or missing a feature? Open an issue — bug reports and feature requests are both welcome.

Translations are the other open door: see po/README.md — add your language to LINGUAS, make po, translate, make mo; the selector reads the disk, nothing to code. For the rest, CDB is under a custom SIEB license: read LICENSE first — it sets specific terms on derivative works and commercial use.

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CodeDashBoard (CDB) by SIEB · eb@sieb.ca · github.com/Eric1212/SIEB-CodeDashBoard