[HN Gopher] Show HN: Tritium - The Legal IDE in Rust
___________________________________________________________________
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.
Author : piker
Score : 87 points
Date : 2025-06-12 12:06 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tritium.legal)
(TXT) w3m dump (tritium.legal)
| jenadine wrote:
| Really cool to see a native app instead of another Electron or
| browser-based tool.
|
| I'm curious what was your experience like building this in Rust?
| Also, how did you find working with egui, what made you choose
| egui over other UI frameworks?
| piker wrote:
| 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.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Not familiar with law enough to understand how to use it. Maybe
| you could show some boring hours long streams of using it in the
| real world and we would understand
| piker wrote:
| 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.
| rafram wrote:
| This is pretty interesting! Did you implement the DOCX support
| and rich-text editor from scratch? I'd be concerned about
| interoperability with other editors -- a semi-compatible editor
| losing content/comments added by other software could be a huge
| problem.
| piker wrote:
| 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.
| tempfile wrote:
| Spent 15 seconds waiting for the spinner to resolve before I gave
| up.
| piker wrote:
| Apologies for that. I thing the pipe is getting hugged a bit
| here. Unfortunately it's a bit lean so no GCP outages to blame
| it on!
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > Tritium is implemented in pure Rust.
|
| This beautiful software that looks a bit like VS Code, what did
| you use to make it? I'm guessing Tauri but curious if you used
| something else.
| piker wrote:
| That's very kind -- let's hope the legal profession feels the
| same way. It's certainly inspired by VS code. It's using egui
| (https://github.com/emilk/egui) under the hood. Big hats off to
| Emil Ernerfeldt and the team at rerun (https://app.rerun.io/)
| for the incredible work on a great immediate mode GUI library.
| pavon wrote:
| Does it have Reveal Codes? :P
| piker wrote:
| Not yet, and I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but that's
| exactly the of question its users should be asking :)
| rahultuladhar wrote:
| This seems pretty cool! I tried it out but I ran into an error
| that froze the entire app on the preview. Seems to be related to
| max pages per paragraph.
| piker wrote:
| Ah yes, that is a bug where the layout engine can't fit it
| correctly and gets stuck in a loop. It maxes out rather than
| overflows, but the same effect. It's being worked on, and sorry
| for the inconvenience.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| My understanding working with law firms was that they are pretty
| bought-in to the Microsoft Office ecosystem, how well does
| Tritium integrate? Is the docx format fully supported? Can one
| person use Tritium without affecting others? Other than tabs,
| what does Tritium offer that two Word panes and a file browser
| pane tiled on screen can't cover?
|
| I am interested in developing software in this space, so these
| are earnest questions and not criticism.
| piker wrote:
| > My understanding working with law firms was that they are
| pretty bought-in to the Microsoft Office ecosystem, how well
| does Tritium integrate?
|
| Absolutely. Overbought. They're owned by Microsoft. Go to a
| legal tech conference and there are thousands of vendors and
| not a single MSFT representative. All they want to do is push
| more Azureware on the deep pockets of profitable firms.
|
| > Is the docx format fully supported?
|
| It will be. There are certainly edge case features that don't
| render correctly yet, but those will come. The 80% that we care
| about should work. No data will be dropped, as mentioned
| elsewhere it will just look bad and gracefully degrade behind
| the scenes to a safe representation that ensures the data isn't
| lost.
|
| > Can one person use Tritium without affecting others?
|
| Yes, it's totally private and secure. Using Tritium doesn't
| require any cloud access or anything like that (other than to
| phone home with the auto-update or your LLM integration). I'm
| going to link the history to a separate hidden directory in the
| filesystem a la .git in the future which will allow some basic
| multi-editor features.
|
| > Other than tabs, what does Tritium offer that two Word panes
| and a file browser pane tiled on screen can't cover?
|
| Great question! It does the things lawyers care about: help
| them pick out symbols (defined terms, specifically) and run
| diffs (redlines) cheap and quick. It also renders PDFs (using
| pdfium).
|
| > I am interested in developing software in this space, so
| these are earnest questions and not criticism.
|
| Drop a line to the email in my bio. I'd love to chat offline.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| It's a catchy name, though ironically tritium is not legal in the
| US, generally[1] (for "frivolous purposes"). Guess this is
| serious software!
|
| 1: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/10/30.19
| piker wrote:
| Can I trademark that slogan? :)
| philsnow wrote:
| I pine for a DSL for legal documents, both because it's tedious
| and tiresome to parse prose like this:
|
| > Except for persons who manufacture, process, produce, or
| initially transfer for sale or distribution self-luminous
| products containing tritium, krypton-85, or promethium-147, and
| except as provided in paragraph (c) of this section, any person
| is exempt from the requirements for a license set forth in
| section 81 of the Act and from the regulations in parts 20 and
| 30 through 36 and 39 of this chapter to the extent that such
| person receives, possesses, uses, transfers, owns, or acquires
| tritium, krypton-85, or promethium-147 in self-luminous
| products manufactured, processed, produced, or initially
| transferred in accordance with a specific license issued
| pursuant to SS 32.22 of this chapter, which license authorizes
| the initial transfer of the product for use under this section.
|
| ... and also because it is ambiguous / error-prone / subject to
| interpretation, especially when figuring out antecedents of
| pronouns, referents, and textual boundaries.
|
| I tried four times to read the above by paragraph without
| reformatting it with some parentheses etc, but failed.
| philsnow wrote:
| .... I _think_ it means that you can make self-luminous
| products without needing a license, as long as you got them
| from somebody who does have a license.
| piker wrote:
| Hey guys - I really appreciate the love from Hacker News. It's a
| real honor to get all of these votes and comments. If you like
| the idea and aren't a lawyer but want to help the project move
| forward, please suggest Tritium to the corporate lawyers you
| know.
| felixg3 wrote:
| Super interesting. Working in consulting, often with corporate
| lawyers. Will check it out.
| brundolf wrote:
| Feedback: the UI feels like a direct reference to VSCode, which
| is familiar to software developers, but not to lawyers. If you're
| hoping this will be adopted by lawyers, I would focus on making
| the UX familiar to _them_. Look at software that they already
| use, and mimic those idioms insomuch as it makes sense to do so.
| I would also have the base web domain link to a normal home /info
| page, not to the demo directly. And maybe prefill the demo with
| some actual content (documents/etc) so people can really see what
| it does and how
|
| Good luck!
| piker wrote:
| Great feedback; and I do agree. The HN link goes to the app
| itself because we're impatient, but there is an actual landing
| page most visitors hit.
|
| I've gone back and forth on the UX idea, and while I do agree,
| it's important that Tritium selects for users that are going to
| be able to quickly adopt the newer concepts. Just simply
| presenting a "better Word" isn't really going to move the
| needle. It's really a shift in expectations. That said, I have
| recently backed off defaulting to dark mode to make it feel
| slightly more familiar.
| brundolf wrote:
| I think software people tend to underestimate the value of
| superficial familiarity. By all means, adhere to your new
| concepts and mental model. But even things like coloring,
| placement of the menu bar, the icons that you use, the
| organization of the UI, etc can go a really long way
|
| Think about programming languages- ones that introduce
| radical new concepts may still employ familiar syntax/naming
| to smooth the transition for newcomers. Rust mimicked C++,
| TypeScript extended JS, etc. These languages were made to
| introduce powerful new ways of thinking about code, but by
| _appearing_ as similar as possible to what devs already knew,
| they freed up more brain cycles for people trying to adopt
| them. They didn 't muddy their concept-space for the sake of
| familiarity, but they didn't introduce any more _un_
| familiarity than they actually needed to for the benefits
| they wanted to give
| tough wrote:
| minor nit: cmd+z is ctrl+z in macos, which felt counter-intuitive
| on an editor
|
| IANAL: idk if lawyers dont do pdfs but tried some research papers
| and PDF rendering could use some love (MacOS)
| piker wrote:
| Noted, and to be fixed. Thank you
| tough wrote:
| I had edited prior message but would be great if supported
| PDF rendering as good as docx! (for research mostly, not a
| lawyer)
| yauneyz wrote:
| If this is Electron, try pdf.js - really good rendering,
| you can create a text layer (for text selection, etc).
| Probably the best result per effort you can get
| tough wrote:
| care to link to repo? alwayss good to have one of these
| at hand
| piker wrote:
| One thing it does is cast the PDF to grayscale to render
| for speed (lawyers rarely care about the color of a legal
| doc in PDF), so perhaps I'll make that an adjustable
| setting which will trade off speed for clarity. Otherwise,
| it uses PDFium for PDF rendering so it should come out just
| as well as what you see in a Chromium-based browser.
| tough wrote:
| might be an issue with DPI / Retina screens on macOS?
|
| it's really more blurry than any pdf on chrome
| https://imgur.com/a/AElOuaA
| piker wrote:
| Oh, yes, that is also a cheat code to render them quicker
| -- it downsamples the render to save time. That will
| improve in future versions as Tritium uses spare cycles
| to increase the resolution.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Say you were going to cold email a lawyer to pitch them to use
| this, what would you write?
| piker wrote:
| Probably something like: "
|
| [Person] - hope you're well! I wanted to put Tritium on your
| radar. It's a word processor jacked on steroids built just for
| transactional lawyers.
|
| From built-in defined term annotation to multi-document
| search/replace to redlining and much, much more, it will help
| your team work faster and more effectively on existing Word
| documents and PDFs. You'll even pick up errors from outside
| counsel.
|
| Tritium runs on Windows, MacOS and even Linux for your most
| tech savvy lawyers.
|
| Please let me know if that might be good for your legal team,
| and I'd love to demo it for you."
| handfuloflight wrote:
| This is a bit too heavy on the feature side. As in, here is
| what this is, not what it will do for you.
|
| What would you say if you were going to focus on a pain point
| and a problem that this specifically solved for you, that it
| can also solve for the other lawyers who are not using this
| and that is not being met by the other options?
| piker wrote:
| Take one feature: redlining. Right now every corporate
| lawyer knows what a pain in the ass it is to do something
| as simple as a diff. It takes probably a full minute
| (imagine if it were like that to run git diff for you!).
| Tritium runs the redline in microseconds, because it's
| built for lawyers.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| There should be a "build" button that pulled all the legal codes
| for the target jurisdiction and other legally binding documents
| and checked if everything checks out.
|
| And to achieve this you would have to create a machine readable
| format for legal documents, and have a library of them already
| converted to it.
|
| Then you could have a linter that highlighted that you made a
| logical mistake or did something wrong from the perspective of a
| legal guy.
| sanufar wrote:
| This looks great! I'm really stoked to see egui being used for
| the desktop app. While I'm not a lawyer, I was wondering about
| the potential for external references to cases, i.e doc1
| references a case which isn't present locally, which can then be
| navigated to via something like "go to definition". Maybe
| something like an indexer that crossrefs on a database of legal
| cases? Do you have any thoughts on some other use cases? The idea
| of an IDE for lawyers is super cool, can't wait to see where this
| goes!
| piker wrote:
| Thanks so much. Yes, the plan is to package libraries along
| with the product to allow for all kinds of external entities to
| be resolved.
|
| Egui is great!
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Probably dumb question:
|
| Given that many lawfirms bill by the hour, are there incentives
| to make their work more efficient? I.e. if a firm were to adopt
| this tool, can they practically charge more per hour than a firm
| that does not?
| piker wrote:
| Yes, they are not incentivized to adopt new technology in their
| current state. The senior partners don't want to wait around
| for the eventuality of charging more per hour. That's why
| Tritium is marked to in-house lawyers for now.
|
| I talked a little about this back in September:
| https://www.legalinnovators.co.uk/post/legal-innovators-uk-t...
| remich wrote:
| As someone who is a (current) software engineer and (former)
| lawyer I find this interesting. Not sure if I'm willing to bet on
| big uptake, though, unless it was through an acquisition by one
| of the big e-discovery companies.
| pbronez wrote:
| Looks great, sharing it with my legal team.
|
| The "Fetch Example" button on the web demo doesn't seem to work.
| It would be nice if the web demo was pre-loaded with some stuff.
| LorenDB wrote:
| I tried coming back to HN using my mouse's back button, but it
| seems Tritium is eating mouse back button events.
| piker wrote:
| Apologies if that's the case. It's just a WASM application
| intended to demo the real desktop application. No nefarious
| purpose there, but perhaps the limitations of the "preview".
| Try the desktop version!
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Couldn't enter Japanese into the web version. Looks like it
| trying to read keys directly. Copy and paste don't work. Right
| clicking doesn't bring up a context menu with system options so
| no looking up words using the locally installed dictionary. No OS
| level spell checking that uses the user's dictionary.
|
| I guess all of that is TBD though I suspect based on the tech
| choices will be way harder than it sounds.
| piker wrote:
| Copy and paste don't work on the web version, but they should
| work (including pasting formatting out into Office products) on
| desktop. Similarly for fonts. If you're using a font that
| contains Japanese characters it should render. It doesn't (yet)
| do a great job on falling back.
|
| Try the download!
| rubyfan wrote:
| I've been dreaming of a better contract writing tool for a while
| now.
|
| I'm not a lawyer but I draft insurance contracts and work with
| reviewing lawyers closely. As a former software developer I miss
| version control, partial includes, conditional logic, etc. I am
| shocked at how poorly supported the business world is by the
| ubiquity of MS Word.
|
| I've been experimenting with Typst now for some time and it has a
| lot of what I want in creating and versioning documents but I
| believe may be too technical to become integrated with existing
| workflows and the non-technical users engaged in the development
| process. Basically my experience is normal users tune out once
| you get outside of even basic MS Word.
|
| I really want a great tool to exist but I'm afraid I'm an outlier
| and unique in my technical ability in this space. Nice to see
| others interested in such a tool.
| segmondy wrote:
| Good stuff on your launch, You need a better demo page. I can't
| see the video, fonts are too small.
| piker wrote:
| Noted, and will be done. Thank you for the feedback. Were you
| on mobile or desktop?
| righthand wrote:
| Recognizing touch controls on the document viewer tab would be
| nice (ex two finger drag is pan, pinch to zoom, etc).
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-06-12 23:00 UTC)