Well just for comparison, I have Notepad++ running right now with 4 medium-sized files open in it, and memory usage is still comfortably under 5 megs.

Well, that seems a bit too much. For comparison, take a look at this example electron app that I wrote to basically check if you're online using IPC.

https://i.imgur.com/g94LOvE.png

It uses around 35MB.

70MB is too much for mainly native application.

For the comparison, IDE sketch (editor with syntax highlighting) from Sciter (HTML/CSS/script engine) SDK (https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-sdk/tree/master/samples/id...) takes 43 MB.

Screenshot: https://sciter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/idea-ide.png

Fresh instance of Kate on my desktop uses 27MB, albeit its way more than a dumb text editor. Still, twice native is still in the same order of magnitude, something most naive electron apps fail to accomplish.

Another thread quoted 300MB baseline