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You can make a bad native app, but you can’t make a good Electron app. Edit to add: Lots of people are mentioning Visual Studio Code. I agree it’s a good app i
by twhb 6y ago
You can make a bad native app, but you can’t make a good Electron app.
Edit to add: Lots of people are mentioning Visual Studio Code. I agree it’s a good app in many dimensions; I didn’t mean to say that an Electron app can’t be good in some ways, even in the most important ways, but rather that Electron introduces flaws that prevent the app from being good in all ways. In particular, while faster than most Electron apps it’s still sluggish on old devices. It still loses track of files when renamed unless you do the rename through Visual Studio Code. The UI elements aren’t as polished as native let alone consistent with it, settings aren’t synced and backed up to iCloud, system-wide keyboard settings aren’t obeyed, Quick Look previews aren’t provided, etc. All of these problems were either introduced by Electron or made more difficult by it.
- josephg 6y agoVS code is really good. Somehow it feels way better to program in than Xcode does. But I don’t know any other electron apps that feel responsive. Slack, discord, Notion... all super simple apps which respond like molasses.
- chadcmulligan 6y agoThere are better choices than both of these imho - Appcode and Jetbrains for example.
- anaisbetts 6y agoIf your example of "Good native application" is AppCode, you're beyond saving lol
- chadcmulligan 6y agothats a bit harsh - Appcode is a java app but better than Xcode and VSCode, and java is a step up from electron in performance. Xcode is faster but lacks a lot of features that Appcode has. If you want fast native development then I recommend Delphi - but that is not PC either.
- cageface 6y agoBitWig audio is a Java UI and is quite competitive with the native DAWs.
- dangus 6y agoOnly takes one counter-example to dismantle this method of thought. ...........VSCode
- saagarjha 6y agoIs there another?
- dangus 6y agoDoes there have to be?
- saagarjha 6y agoNo, but it'd let me know about other apps I should know about.
- statictype 6y agoSuperhuman?
- sneakymichael 6y agoVSCode is the most sluggish app I use on my 2019 Mac, by far. I genuinely don't understand how people can say that it feels responsive and like-native, unless they have much more performant equipment than I. I use it because it's packed with useful functionality, but …I resent using it– I think I'd adore it if it were native.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pier25 6y agoI agree. I tried it recently for a couple of weeks and went back to Sublime.
- brutal_boi 6y ago
- statictype 6y agoSuperhuman and VS Code are excellent apps. And are built on Electron.
- ddevault 6y agoAlmost every comment refers to VSCode, which is... bizzare. VSCode has abysmal performance. I'm a Vim user and every time I've encountered VSCode it's just been awful, awful, awful. There's some kind of brainwashing going on here. Probably something along the lines of "I write webshit, and if webshit is bad, I might be bad by association, so webshit is definitely not bad".
- austincummings 6y ago> There's some kind of brainwashing going on here. Or perhaps it's because it is so commonly used.
- twicetwice 6y agoVSCode runs amazingly on my 2.5 year old laptop. And while I love the word "webshit" in itself -- it's a very pleasing word to say -- I object to it. The web is not universally shit. It has advantages: primarily almost truly "write once, run anywhere." I run Ubuntu. I almost certainly would not be able to use VSCode on my laptop if it were not an Electron app. I am better off having an Electron version of VSCode than some native version of it existing that doesn't run on Linux. (Also, isn't Visual Studio a native app, and hot garbage compared to VSCode? I've never used it, but that's what I hear.)
- ddevault 6y ago>VSCode runs amazingly on my 2.5 year old laptop. Is this some kind of great achievement? Vim runs ten times as fast on a 28 year old PDP-11. >The web is not universally shit. [citation needed] To quote the old Java saying, saying "write once, run everywhere" is a selling point of Java is like saying anal sex is great because it works on all genders. Like... maybe, but it's not really the point. You couldn't use VSCode on Linux, but you could use any of several much better editors, and effectively double your RAM to boot. >(Also, isn't Visual Studio a native app, and hot garbage compared to VSCode? I've never used it, but that's what I hear.) Back when I used Windows as a dev platform, years and years ago, Visual Studio was quite pleasant. The experience of that back in the day is much better than the experiences I had with VSCode more recently. But both of them are terrible compared to the native development environment of Linux.
- whycombagator 6y agoI agree. I use vscode, but I miss the speed of sublime for large projects & the terminal emulator will crash/freeze for me occasionally (which also seems to happen in IntelliJ based editors as well)