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This is written by the same guy who wrote Electrino, which was supposed to be a lightweight Electron replacement but never really caught on. So I'm not surprise

by tbodt 9y ago

This is written by the same guy who wrote Electrino, which was supposed to be a lightweight Electron replacement but never really caught on. So I'm not surprised that this has a lot of code from Electrino in the core. This is a great way to use the idea of Electrino for something that doesn't require many years of work to become useful.

pavlov 9y ago
Yes, that's me! I feel a bit sad that I was unable to put in the work to bring Electrino forward. There was a lot of interest, but I just couldn't find any more extra time between existing paying work and family. As you say, Electrino is a multi-year commitment because of the sheer number of APIs needed to support the apps that are already out there. I made Termipal because I found myself writing a bunch of crappy shell scripts for various tasks, and having real UI with dropdowns and buttons made the scripts much more usable.
- kaoD 9y ago
  Hey! I just discovered Electrino from this thread and no wonder it grabbed a lot of interest! I didn't even consider the idea and now I want it. I used to be a native dev (from when native meant desktop OS :P) and switched to web apps just for UI development convenience, then node-webkit came. I still use both nw.js and Electron (though I admit I kinda like nw.js more, IPC is a PITA) but, even though I love the development experience, I absolutely hate the end user experience. Can you elaborate on why is Electrino a multi-year commitment? I guess I can see why if you meant Electrino as a drop-in replacement of Electron. Did you consider scaling down the features a bit? Just bundle a native webview + Node.js, add some kind of IPC and let userland do the rest. Would this be achievable or am I missing something that makes it way harder than I imagine? EDIT: After scanning my own comment I see why... the idea is to not bundle Node.js and instead use the native JS engine which does not include Node APIs nor leverages the NPM ecosystem.

by tbodt 9y ago

pavlov 9y ago

Yes, that's me! I feel a bit sad that I was unable to put in the work to bring Electrino forward. There was a lot of interest, but I just couldn't find any more extra time between existing paying work and family. As you say, Electrino is a multi-year commitment because of the sheer number of APIs needed to support the apps that are already out there. I made Termipal because I found myself writing a bunch of crappy shell scripts for various tasks, and having real UI with dropdowns and buttons made the scripts much more usable.

kaoD 9y ago
Hey! I just discovered Electrino from this thread and no wonder it grabbed a lot of interest! I didn't even consider the idea and now I want it. I used to be a native dev (from when native meant desktop OS :P) and switched to web apps just for UI development convenience, then node-webkit came. I still use both nw.js and Electron (though I admit I kinda like nw.js more, IPC is a PITA) but, even though I love the development experience, I absolutely hate the end user experience. Can you elaborate on why is Electrino a multi-year commitment? I guess I can see why if you meant Electrino as a drop-in replacement of Electron. Did you consider scaling down the features a bit? Just bundle a native webview + Node.js, add some kind of IPC and let userland do the rest. Would this be achievable or am I missing something that makes it way harder than I imagine? EDIT: After scanning my own comment I see why... the idea is to not bundle Node.js and instead use the native JS engine which does not include Node APIs nor leverages the NPM ecosystem.