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Like I've said a million times, https://medium.com/p/electron-is-cancer-b066108e6c32 https://medium.com/p/electron-is-cancer-b066108e6c32 Why would you use a f

Like I've said a million times, https://medium.com/p/electron-is-cancer-b066108e6c32 https://medium.com/p/electron-is-cancer-b066108e6c32 Why would you use a full web stack terminal emulator, over.. well a normal native and actually reasonably fast terminal emulator? The trend is catching on, so maybe one day we can't even reach for a native email client because it will be unmaintained in favour of the hackable html webstack email client. Congratulations on reaching v2 tho!

Agebor 8y ago
Look several years into the future and what you could have there is electron being faster/lighter. Being web-based gives you a standard way for fetching and displaying content. It's just a matter of time that the performance improves. Especially when many people are experimenting with it. > maybe one day we can't even reach for a native email client because it will be unmaintained in favour of the hackable html webstack email client. It's definitely possible, once the browser becomes the new OS.
- OberstKrueger 8y ago
  That's what has been said for a while about Electron: it'll be optimized and less heavy. Most applications use Electron are just as heavy as they always has been, and where there are exceptions, it's more due to moving away from the Electron-stack and putting functionality in lower-level languages, or things like this where it uses only a few elements and defers to other rendering techniques.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  Why spend the time and effort to do that, though? The amount of resources used to bring Electron into something reasonable could be better used elsewhere, advancing things that we don't already have.
movedx 8y ago
Good read. Thanks. And I agree: Electron is horrible to deal with as an end-user. I've been using Vim for some time and then decided to use VS Code. The integrations, plugins, and everything else were awesome, but man the 3-4GB of RAM was just crazy. Despite the fact my machine has 16GB of RAM, I'm dealing with quite a few VMs and Docker containers locally, so actually 16GB isn't a lot.
- fbnlsr 8y ago
  I've been using VSCode for years and it's been great, but I'm always looking for learning something new. I keep reading about Vim and last time I checked it seems SO complicated to use. I don't understand how it's so popular. Is it because it's blazing fast?
  - caspervonb 8y ago
    Does editing text with the keyboard alone make sense to you? That's the gist of it, you use commands to manipulate text. It's hard to grok at first when you're only used to textarea style editors without modes.
  - movedx 8y ago
    It has a learning curve that'll take about 2-3 weeks to convert to muscle memory and become habit. Give it a shot. You'll learn something new and if it doesn't work out, VSCode will still be there :-)
  - jannes 8y ago
    You can use vim keybindings in VSCode. It mostly works, except for more advanced stuff. Correct indentation when pasting is a pain in my opinion. And somehow I find the VSCode's multi-cursor feature so much more convenient than Vim's macros.
    - movedx 8y ago
      > Correct indentation when pasting is a pain in my opinion. :set paste :)
    - SPBS 8y ago
      > And somehow I find the VSCode's multi-cursor feature so much more convenient than Vim's macros. That’s not an unpopular opinion, I suspect it’s because multiple cursors provide an extremely tight visual feedback loop (feedback after every action) as compared to macros where you kind of just shove actions into a black box and pray it works correctly for the next location you test it on
caspervonb 8y ago
Oh and as for the title on that article, Bunch of people took offence and no one got it but it's a reference to when Balmer called GPL/LGPL cancer and hippie culture.
Immortalin 8y ago
Because it's pretty. Because you get state of the art Unicode decoding and support. Because you can get a terminal on Linux in a first class GUI system that's normalized across all major operating systems backed by billions of investment.
- rusk 8y ago
  Most modern terminal emulators will give you all of this, in fairness, and it’s probably one of the simplest classes of programs for which to provide this!
- danieldk 8y ago
  Because you get state of the art Unicode decoding and support. What does this even mean? UTF-8 decoding is trivial. In fact it's designed to be simple: it's a prefix code that is self-synchronizing. Rendering glyphs and composing characters is hard in comparison. But Cocoa, Qt, etc. have had great support for rendering unicode for ages now. I have no recollection of having problems with iTerm, Terminal.app and many Linux terminals for rendering unicode the last decade or so. (Only with people setting their locales wrong.)
mercer 8y ago
I'm generally pretty pragmatic about using stuff that is convenient even if might not be too efficient, but I have to agree with most usage of Electron that I find. I'm using a MacBook that, while a few years old, still does almost everything well. It struggles when I have a few Electron-based apps open and that's just ridiculous. It also drastically impacts battery life. It's reached a point where I use my iOS devices for Spotify and/or Slack just so my laptop can run whatever other crappy Electron app I need to use. I find that VSCode is almost worth it, but that's perhaps one of the few exceptions (and I still go for Sublime Text most of the time). Any app that needs to be persistent really has no business using Electron. It's a terrible waste.

Agebor 8y ago

Look several years into the future and what you could have there is electron being faster/lighter. Being web-based gives you a standard way for fetching and displaying content. It's just a matter of time that the performance improves. Especially when many people are experimenting with it. > maybe one day we can't even reach for a native email client because it will be unmaintained in favour of the hackable html webstack email client. It's definitely possible, once the browser becomes the new OS.

OberstKrueger 8y ago
That's what has been said for a while about Electron: it'll be optimized and less heavy. Most applications use Electron are just as heavy as they always has been, and where there are exceptions, it's more due to moving away from the Electron-stack and putting functionality in lower-level languages, or things like this where it uses only a few elements and defers to other rendering techniques.
s73v3r_ 8y ago
Why spend the time and effort to do that, though? The amount of resources used to bring Electron into something reasonable could be better used elsewhere, advancing things that we don't already have.

movedx 8y ago

Good read. Thanks. And I agree: Electron is horrible to deal with as an end-user. I've been using Vim for some time and then decided to use VS Code. The integrations, plugins, and everything else were awesome, but man the 3-4GB of RAM was just crazy. Despite the fact my machine has 16GB of RAM, I'm dealing with quite a few VMs and Docker containers locally, so actually 16GB isn't a lot.

fbnlsr 8y ago
I've been using VSCode for years and it's been great, but I'm always looking for learning something new. I keep reading about Vim and last time I checked it seems SO complicated to use. I don't understand how it's so popular. Is it because it's blazing fast?
- caspervonb 8y ago
  Does editing text with the keyboard alone make sense to you? That's the gist of it, you use commands to manipulate text. It's hard to grok at first when you're only used to textarea style editors without modes.
- movedx 8y ago
  It has a learning curve that'll take about 2-3 weeks to convert to muscle memory and become habit. Give it a shot. You'll learn something new and if it doesn't work out, VSCode will still be there :-)
- jannes 8y ago
  You can use vim keybindings in VSCode. It mostly works, except for more advanced stuff. Correct indentation when pasting is a pain in my opinion. And somehow I find the VSCode's multi-cursor feature so much more convenient than Vim's macros.
  - movedx 8y ago
    > Correct indentation when pasting is a pain in my opinion. :set paste :)
  - SPBS 8y ago
    > And somehow I find the VSCode's multi-cursor feature so much more convenient than Vim's macros. That’s not an unpopular opinion, I suspect it’s because multiple cursors provide an extremely tight visual feedback loop (feedback after every action) as compared to macros where you kind of just shove actions into a black box and pray it works correctly for the next location you test it on

caspervonb 8y ago

Oh and as for the title on that article, Bunch of people took offence and no one got it but it's a reference to when Balmer called GPL/LGPL cancer and hippie culture.

Immortalin 8y ago

Because it's pretty. Because you get state of the art Unicode decoding and support. Because you can get a terminal on Linux in a first class GUI system that's normalized across all major operating systems backed by billions of investment.

rusk 8y ago
Most modern terminal emulators will give you all of this, in fairness, and it’s probably one of the simplest classes of programs for which to provide this!
danieldk 8y ago
Because you get state of the art Unicode decoding and support. What does this even mean? UTF-8 decoding is trivial. In fact it's designed to be simple: it's a prefix code that is self-synchronizing. Rendering glyphs and composing characters is hard in comparison. But Cocoa, Qt, etc. have had great support for rendering unicode for ages now. I have no recollection of having problems with iTerm, Terminal.app and many Linux terminals for rendering unicode the last decade or so. (Only with people setting their locales wrong.)

mercer 8y ago

I'm generally pretty pragmatic about using stuff that is convenient even if might not be too efficient, but I have to agree with most usage of Electron that I find. I'm using a MacBook that, while a few years old, still does almost everything well. It struggles when I have a few Electron-based apps open and that's just ridiculous. It also drastically impacts battery life. It's reached a point where I use my iOS devices for Spotify and/or Slack just so my laptop can run whatever other crappy Electron app I need to use. I find that VSCode is almost worth it, but that's perhaps one of the few exceptions (and I still go for Sublime Text most of the time). Any app that needs to be persistent really has no business using Electron. It's a terrible waste.