4 ms·

Pop quiz: what's more ridiculous, nodejs based command line utilities that do the same thing as two existing shell utilities and a pipe or a while loop etc; OR,

Pop quiz: what's more ridiculous, nodejs based command line utilities that do the same thing as two existing shell utilities and a pipe or a while loop etc; OR, an electron "shell"... which can then run those same nodejs "utilities"... Oh maybe that's the whole point. They want "it's javascript all the way down". I think I'd literally rather use a shell built on actual turtles. A turtle-shell, if you will.

discordance 9y ago
Zeit's generally pretty JavaScript focused so it doesn't surprise me, but another electron app. Man :'(
jitix 9y ago
The whole electron stack disgusts me. Mainly because of battery usage on my laptop and my phone! Its a clear example of "We can do it but should we do we?" The answer is NO!
- agumonkey 9y ago
  hey, how else can I change the transparency of my shell with css ?
  - alehander42 9y ago
    you're kidding, but that's really it: people love to hate on electron, but nobody has a better solution. it's about "I can reuse my web-based UI on all desktops, mobile and web", not about css
    - agumonkey 9y ago
      Well web based uis are subpar IMO, especially accounting for resource cost. /me goes back to emacs
  - majewsky 9y ago
    You can't. You can only change the transparency of the terminal. This comment (though probably by mistake) manages to perfectly illustrate the "reinventing things that we don't even understand" mindset that's going on in most of tech. (Also, there exist terminals written in C++ with Qt, and QtWidgets has had CSS support for custom styling for at least 10 years, probably much longer.)
    - btrask 9y ago
      This is a great "well actually" that also manages to be technically incorrect. If you change the styling in your terminal emulator, it changes the transparency of your shell (and other terminal programs).
    - AstralStorm 9y ago
      The main example would probably be Konsole from KDE. Quite a hog in the world of terminals but doors is things well. Compared to running an electron instance, it is slim.
  - JetSpiegel 9y ago
    With Gnome Terminal, it uses CSS to style the desktop.
  - stephenr 9y ago
    Why do you need to use CSS specifically? macOS built-in Terminal.app has had transparency (even varying transparency for focused vs background windows) for years. Edit: oh, maybe you were being sarcastic? It's been a long day.
    - agumonkey 9y ago
      yeah, I was. I understand the appeal of having html/css hyperdynamism everywhere. And at the same time I don't want to pay the price to the point that I prefer living in lotech linux land. I value frugal over potential flexibility these days. I told that often, but the other day I booted win9x (on a pentium 3 or less, some MB of ram, maybe 64) and ran an old copy of turbo pascal 7 (dos). That thing was flying. It had 80% of what I wanted (including, hear this, ascii shadowed floating editing windows.. talk about overfancy) and used zero resources. Today to have that kind of interactions you'd need a somehow recent quad core and 4GB+ of ram. All that mostly for a bit of eye candy (css may be of some use to decorate tokens/entities to give additional info, but I rarely see that).
      - pantulis 9y ago
        Oh, Turbo Pascal had those Turbovision-powered ASCII shadowed floating editing windows in 1993 or so, and it flied on a 386 CPU... the P3 would be a screamer for that ;)
        agumonkey 9y ago
        Thanks for that input, I was very curious to know about performance on much older hardware. This makes TP's worht even higher. 600kB total .. can you believe that ?
        pantulis 9y ago
        Turbo Pascal had more tricks, it could compile to memory (at least in version 5, if memory serves well). Mind you, not a RAM disk, it could compile and run a MSDOS .COM file from memory itself. Following the filenames during compilation was difficult, as they passed so fast (20Mhz 386sx with 2MB). The compilers and IDEs from that era were truly pieces of art. I also remember TopSpeed Modula-2 that also included its own task scheduler for real time DOS (using clock interrupts, I guess).
- drinchev 9y ago
  Electron doesn’t work on iOS or Android, so phone is inaccurate.
- paulintrognon 9y ago
  It's not because it exists that you should use it. If you don't like it, don't use it, and it won't take any battery usage on your phone I personnaly think a terminal based on web technologies is not something I would use, but if people are happy to use it, as soon as they are aware of the tradeoffs, why not?
Yetanfou 9y ago
To really get into the 'JS all the way down' you could run it on JSLinux [1] or a similar JS-based full system emulator. [1] https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/
sandis 9y ago
We're getting here - https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
royjacobs 9y ago
My annoyance with Electron surfaces when it's being used for tools that you need to use a lot and that potentially are started often, with a lot of instances. Slack clients for instance, but editors and terminals as well. These are precisely the kinds of applications where you want low memory usage and milliseconds worth of startup time. Additionally, this annoyance probably has more to do with the fact that Electron is used by developers for other developers. If it would be used to replace Excel the rage would probably be less pronounced. I'm still wondering what would happen though, because of all the subtle ways in which the UI experience would be broken for someone who's used to Excel.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
bjpbakker 9y ago
Turtle [0] indeed is a much more useful "shell" (it's not actually a shell, but so isn't this electron thing) [0] - https://hackage.haskell.org/package/turtle https://hackage.haskell.org/package/turtle
ihuman 9y ago
If you want an aquatic shell, there's always fish https://fishshell.com/ https://fishshell.com/

discordance 9y ago

Zeit's generally pretty JavaScript focused so it doesn't surprise me, but another electron app. Man :'(

jitix 9y ago

The whole electron stack disgusts me. Mainly because of battery usage on my laptop and my phone! Its a clear example of "We can do it but should we do we?" The answer is NO!

agumonkey 9y ago
hey, how else can I change the transparency of my shell with css ?
- alehander42 9y ago
  you're kidding, but that's really it: people love to hate on electron, but nobody has a better solution. it's about "I can reuse my web-based UI on all desktops, mobile and web", not about css
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    Well web based uis are subpar IMO, especially accounting for resource cost. /me goes back to emacs
- majewsky 9y ago
  You can't. You can only change the transparency of the terminal. This comment (though probably by mistake) manages to perfectly illustrate the "reinventing things that we don't even understand" mindset that's going on in most of tech. (Also, there exist terminals written in C++ with Qt, and QtWidgets has had CSS support for custom styling for at least 10 years, probably much longer.)
  - btrask 9y ago
    This is a great "well actually" that also manages to be technically incorrect. If you change the styling in your terminal emulator, it changes the transparency of your shell (and other terminal programs).
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    The main example would probably be Konsole from KDE. Quite a hog in the world of terminals but doors is things well. Compared to running an electron instance, it is slim.
- JetSpiegel 9y ago
  With Gnome Terminal, it uses CSS to style the desktop.
- stephenr 9y ago
  Why do you need to use CSS specifically? macOS built-in Terminal.app has had transparency (even varying transparency for focused vs background windows) for years. Edit: oh, maybe you were being sarcastic? It's been a long day.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    yeah, I was. I understand the appeal of having html/css hyperdynamism everywhere. And at the same time I don't want to pay the price to the point that I prefer living in lotech linux land. I value frugal over potential flexibility these days. I told that often, but the other day I booted win9x (on a pentium 3 or less, some MB of ram, maybe 64) and ran an old copy of turbo pascal 7 (dos). That thing was flying. It had 80% of what I wanted (including, hear this, ascii shadowed floating editing windows.. talk about overfancy) and used zero resources. Today to have that kind of interactions you'd need a somehow recent quad core and 4GB+ of ram. All that mostly for a bit of eye candy (css may be of some use to decorate tokens/entities to give additional info, but I rarely see that).
    - pantulis 9y ago
      Oh, Turbo Pascal had those Turbovision-powered ASCII shadowed floating editing windows in 1993 or so, and it flied on a 386 CPU... the P3 would be a screamer for that ;)
      - agumonkey 9y ago
        Thanks for that input, I was very curious to know about performance on much older hardware. This makes TP's worht even higher. 600kB total .. can you believe that ?
        pantulis 9y ago
        Turbo Pascal had more tricks, it could compile to memory (at least in version 5, if memory serves well). Mind you, not a RAM disk, it could compile and run a MSDOS .COM file from memory itself. Following the filenames during compilation was difficult, as they passed so fast (20Mhz 386sx with 2MB). The compilers and IDEs from that era were truly pieces of art. I also remember TopSpeed Modula-2 that also included its own task scheduler for real time DOS (using clock interrupts, I guess).
drinchev 9y ago
Electron doesn’t work on iOS or Android, so phone is inaccurate.
paulintrognon 9y ago
It's not because it exists that you should use it. If you don't like it, don't use it, and it won't take any battery usage on your phone I personnaly think a terminal based on web technologies is not something I would use, but if people are happy to use it, as soon as they are aware of the tradeoffs, why not?

Yetanfou 9y ago

To really get into the 'JS all the way down' you could run it on JSLinux [1] or a similar JS-based full system emulator. [1] https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/

sandis 9y ago

We're getting here - https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

royjacobs 9y ago

My annoyance with Electron surfaces when it's being used for tools that you need to use a lot and that potentially are started often, with a lot of instances. Slack clients for instance, but editors and terminals as well. These are precisely the kinds of applications where you want low memory usage and milliseconds worth of startup time. Additionally, this annoyance probably has more to do with the fact that Electron is used by developers for other developers. If it would be used to replace Excel the rage would probably be less pronounced. I'm still wondering what would happen though, because of all the subtle ways in which the UI experience would be broken for someone who's used to Excel.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

bjpbakker 9y ago

Turtle [0] indeed is a much more useful "shell" (it's not actually a shell, but so isn't this electron thing) [0] - https://hackage.haskell.org/package/turtle https://hackage.haskell.org/package/turtle

ihuman 9y ago

If you want an aquatic shell, there's always fish https://fishshell.com/ https://fishshell.com/