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I think the author should be applauded for developing a native application instead of yet another electron app. Having a gui for version control is very useful,

I think the author should be applauded for developing a native application instead of yet another electron app. Having a gui for version control is very useful, especially for working out branches, merging etc. The edge cases can always be handled from CLI. For reference, I worked on Perforce for many years and having P4Win instead of the p4 command line was a godsend for most cases because of the hugely complex underlying tool chain.

fmakunbound 7y ago
It's a Qt application in this case. IIRC, Qt draws controls itself, rather than relying on native platform controls.
- inetknght 7y ago
  Even so, Qt has a hell of a lot less of a footprint than Electron.
- vimslayer 7y ago
  AFAIK it's possible to use native controls too with Qt these days. I don't know if this project is doing so (probably not).
- franga2000 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure it can (and might by default) use native controls on macOS, and I've heard of that possibility on other platforms as well, but I'm not sure how far that's gotten.
  - jcelerier 7y ago
    "more or less", on Mac it will sometimes use dummy OS controls for the sake of rendering, e.g. like here : https://code.woboq.org/qt5/qtbase/src/plugins/styles/mac/qmacstyle_mac.mm.html#3625 https://code.woboq.org/qt5/qtbase/src/plugins/styles/mac/qma... But it cannot just use native controls all the time as it generally supports more features than what is available on a given platform, so there has to be a kind of emulation.
mekster 7y ago
Why are people still not liking electron apps? Are they using machines from before 2010 and some system resources is a limiting factor? Also, I would vastly prefer electron apps instead of using a native toolkit that's not following the interface guideline of the OS that looks to be using free icon set from the 90s instead of using Font Awesome or similar.
- jcelerier 7y ago
  I have a vastly overpowered machine - i7 6900k, GTX 1080 and electron apps definitely don't feel as snappy as apps using traditional GUI toolkits. They almost all have typing latency, loading screens, etc... a pain all around. My blood pressure decreased by a huge amount the day I replaced discord & slack by ripcord... and it's also much better in term of UX when you are on a ton of different instances. e.g. the difference in responsivity is huge : https://streamable.com/ori2yg https://streamable.com/ori2yg and ripcord does so in 87 megabytes of RAM with while slack does it in 758 : https://i.imgur.com/xivK3gr.png https://i.imgur.com/xivK3gr.png and that's not counting that I would also need discord next to it. I had to buy 64gb on that machine because of all this fuckery - add a few additional work workspaces and a 16gb machine which is already more than what the general public have and it's unuseable. Just checked in the website of the biggest french retailer, and 7 out of the 10 most currently sold laptops have 8 gigs of ram for instance.
  - vedant_shety 7y ago
    What's your opinion on VSCode. It feels pretty snappy on my laptop, from what I understand it's written in electron
    - jcelerier 7y ago
      it's here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22948981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22948981
- gkya 7y ago
  > Are they using machines from before 2010 and some system resources is a limiting factor? This is the most annoying thing with developers: many of them believe that a normal laptop from around 2010 is "underpowered" and everybody's using the latest macbook pro or some high-end device. But the majority of people use average computers with 4-8GB RAM and some random CPU. Most machines don't run on high-quality fast SSDs. Also, the app is perfectly following the user guidelines of usable OSes: pre Win8 Windows and pre Gnome3 Linux. Those icons from the "90s" make sense and communicate their functionality well, because they adhere to some convention and are not pure fluff like FontAwesome et al. are. The sheer ignorance of dev community wrt. usability both in design and in performance is sad. Desktop is where people get work done and the bastardized mobile interfaces Win8, Gnome 3, and Electron brought there are nothing but an obstacle. Macs seem to not have gone to that direction yet, but slowly "advancing". It's telling that none of the widely used IDEs---Even Android Studio or XCode---don't adhere to these bullshit "interface guidelines".
karimmaassen 7y ago
Out of curiosity, why do you prefer a native app over an electron app?
- sixstringtheory 7y ago
  Other commenters are rightfully pointing out the continued performance issues, but just as important for me is the platform citizenship of electron apps. The glut of new ones I use for work on macOS: VSCode, Slack, Notion and Height all have different keybindings than any other apps, some completely disable command+? which I use to find/learn commands for operations I don’t already know. Some just don’t use the menu bar at all. Layout is awful in them, like slack threads being a sliver of the right side of the window, or notion’s usable area maxing out at 800 pixels, or height’s window being fixed to a minimum of 800. Some don’t respect auto dark/light mode. Notion has completely upended many tried and true patterns from word processing. Links take you to the browser based version instead of deep linking to the app. Of course there are some things I do like about each app, but for me they aren’t worth the tradeoff for the ramp up time on a new product coupled with the annoyances I encounter when using these new apps. I can get things done just fine in a github repo full of markdown, or apple notes, or email, or Xcode, or textedit or sublime text, and on and on. Not to forget the venerable command line. I think the one web app I legitimately enjoy using is trello.
- AnonC 7y ago
  Not GP, but Electron apps to me have a specific “smell”. When you run one, you get to know it’s an Electron app without prior knowledge of that fact. Slow launches, massive memory usage that initiates thrashing, standard OS keyboard bindings not working, actions within the app being sluggish (especially if this is not the only app running and there are other apps using some RAM), and sometimes several crashes too. I know that there are some Electron apps that behave well and perform well (responsiveness and RAM usage), but those are in the minority. One could always run a bloated Electron app as the only foreground app on the system and give it more resources, but the usability compromises are hard to get over if you’re someone who likes learning and using keyboard shortcuts and other OS specific interactions.
- favorited 7y ago

fmakunbound 7y ago

It's a Qt application in this case. IIRC, Qt draws controls itself, rather than relying on native platform controls.

inetknght 7y ago
Even so, Qt has a hell of a lot less of a footprint than Electron.
vimslayer 7y ago
AFAIK it's possible to use native controls too with Qt these days. I don't know if this project is doing so (probably not).
franga2000 7y ago
I'm pretty sure it can (and might by default) use native controls on macOS, and I've heard of that possibility on other platforms as well, but I'm not sure how far that's gotten.
- jcelerier 7y ago
  "more or less", on Mac it will sometimes use dummy OS controls for the sake of rendering, e.g. like here : https://code.woboq.org/qt5/qtbase/src/plugins/styles/mac/qmacstyle_mac.mm.html#3625 https://code.woboq.org/qt5/qtbase/src/plugins/styles/mac/qma... But it cannot just use native controls all the time as it generally supports more features than what is available on a given platform, so there has to be a kind of emulation.

mekster 7y ago

Why are people still not liking electron apps? Are they using machines from before 2010 and some system resources is a limiting factor? Also, I would vastly prefer electron apps instead of using a native toolkit that's not following the interface guideline of the OS that looks to be using free icon set from the 90s instead of using Font Awesome or similar.

jcelerier 7y ago
I have a vastly overpowered machine - i7 6900k, GTX 1080 and electron apps definitely don't feel as snappy as apps using traditional GUI toolkits. They almost all have typing latency, loading screens, etc... a pain all around. My blood pressure decreased by a huge amount the day I replaced discord & slack by ripcord... and it's also much better in term of UX when you are on a ton of different instances. e.g. the difference in responsivity is huge : https://streamable.com/ori2yg https://streamable.com/ori2yg and ripcord does so in 87 megabytes of RAM with while slack does it in 758 : https://i.imgur.com/xivK3gr.png https://i.imgur.com/xivK3gr.png and that's not counting that I would also need discord next to it. I had to buy 64gb on that machine because of all this fuckery - add a few additional work workspaces and a 16gb machine which is already more than what the general public have and it's unuseable. Just checked in the website of the biggest french retailer, and 7 out of the 10 most currently sold laptops have 8 gigs of ram for instance.
- vedant_shety 7y ago
  What's your opinion on VSCode. It feels pretty snappy on my laptop, from what I understand it's written in electron
  - jcelerier 7y ago
    it's here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22948981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22948981
gkya 7y ago
> Are they using machines from before 2010 and some system resources is a limiting factor? This is the most annoying thing with developers: many of them believe that a normal laptop from around 2010 is "underpowered" and everybody's using the latest macbook pro or some high-end device. But the majority of people use average computers with 4-8GB RAM and some random CPU. Most machines don't run on high-quality fast SSDs. Also, the app is perfectly following the user guidelines of usable OSes: pre Win8 Windows and pre Gnome3 Linux. Those icons from the "90s" make sense and communicate their functionality well, because they adhere to some convention and are not pure fluff like FontAwesome et al. are. The sheer ignorance of dev community wrt. usability both in design and in performance is sad. Desktop is where people get work done and the bastardized mobile interfaces Win8, Gnome 3, and Electron brought there are nothing but an obstacle. Macs seem to not have gone to that direction yet, but slowly "advancing". It's telling that none of the widely used IDEs---Even Android Studio or XCode---don't adhere to these bullshit "interface guidelines".

karimmaassen 7y ago

Out of curiosity, why do you prefer a native app over an electron app?

sixstringtheory 7y ago
Other commenters are rightfully pointing out the continued performance issues, but just as important for me is the platform citizenship of electron apps. The glut of new ones I use for work on macOS: VSCode, Slack, Notion and Height all have different keybindings than any other apps, some completely disable command+? which I use to find/learn commands for operations I don’t already know. Some just don’t use the menu bar at all. Layout is awful in them, like slack threads being a sliver of the right side of the window, or notion’s usable area maxing out at 800 pixels, or height’s window being fixed to a minimum of 800. Some don’t respect auto dark/light mode. Notion has completely upended many tried and true patterns from word processing. Links take you to the browser based version instead of deep linking to the app. Of course there are some things I do like about each app, but for me they aren’t worth the tradeoff for the ramp up time on a new product coupled with the annoyances I encounter when using these new apps. I can get things done just fine in a github repo full of markdown, or apple notes, or email, or Xcode, or textedit or sublime text, and on and on. Not to forget the venerable command line. I think the one web app I legitimately enjoy using is trello.
AnonC 7y ago
Not GP, but Electron apps to me have a specific “smell”. When you run one, you get to know it’s an Electron app without prior knowledge of that fact. Slow launches, massive memory usage that initiates thrashing, standard OS keyboard bindings not working, actions within the app being sluggish (especially if this is not the only app running and there are other apps using some RAM), and sometimes several crashes too. I know that there are some Electron apps that behave well and perform well (responsiveness and RAM usage), but those are in the minority. One could always run a bloated Electron app as the only foreground app on the system and give it more resources, but the usability compromises are hard to get over if you’re someone who likes learning and using keyboard shortcuts and other OS specific interactions.
favorited 7y ago