5 ms·

Just for the note: it is not ElectronJS. html-notepad is Sciter based application so its distribution is only 5 MB. It's sources are here https://github.com/c

Just for the note: it is not ElectronJS. html-notepad is Sciter based application so its distribution is only 5 MB. It's sources are here https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-sdk/tree/master/notepad https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-sdk/tree/master/notepad . This still uses old Sciter.TIS and I am porting it to new Sciter - the one that uses JavaScript. I am an author of the editor (and Sciter).

kjksf 5y ago
You should fix Windows portable .zip so that it's not sciter/sciter/sdk/bin/32/html-notepad.exe
flixic 5y ago
I almost wish it was Electron based. A bunch of things made the usage almost impossible. - MacOS has handy text navigation shortcuts: alt-arrow to go back a word, alt+shift+arrow to select a word, etc. These don't work, and I'm too used to them to stop using. - I'm using Colemak keyboard layout (L key inserts letter "i"), but keyboard shortcuts don't respect it. So in my mind I have to press Cmd + U ("u" is mapped to I key) to make text Italic. Again, this broke my usual habbits. - Common MacOS shortcuts (even Cmd + Q to quit) don't work. I like the ideas behind this editor, but now I hope someone ports it to HTML + JavaScript, so it works keeping all the OS-provided affordances.
- c-smile 5y ago
  Yes, its operation on MacOS needs some attention. In fact I've created the notepad as a demo project for Sciter SDK (https://sciter.com https://sciter.com). The same as Sciter Notes: https://notes.sciter.com https://notes.sciter.com It is just that at some point someone asked me to make distribution so I've created that web site. Another question was to understand: donation-ware, is it a sustainable solution. Apparently it is not - donation does not even cover sums asked by Apple for allowance to develop software for their platform.
- unicornporn 5y ago
  > alt-arrow to go back a word, alt+shift+arrow to select a word, etc. These don't work, and I'm too used to them to stop using. Will sadly make it unusable for me. Thanks for saving me the time.
  - c-smile 5y ago
    If someone wants to take care about this html-notepad - please let me know. I don't mind if it will be commercial product or not - I'll help anyway. As I said - it can be ported to new Sciter (it uses JS now) as it is - relatively easy. Just drop me a message at https://sciter.com/contact_us/ https://sciter.com/contact_us/
- primax 5y ago
  This feels a bit like the old reddit post about how now one would ever use Dropbox because you can just roll your own FTP server. Good points though on OS tracked features.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - phist_mcgee 5y ago
    For anyone who might be interested in the referenced comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- toomanyducks 5y ago
  Tangential, but for the pain of alternate keyboard layouts, I've found it easiest to use a keyboard that allows remapping of keys in hardware to alternate layouts (sends the 'wrong' keycode when you press a key). It's a bit of a hack, but it works much better than equivalent software hacks.
  - flixic 5y ago
    System having "both views" -- software view (where "i" might be on key L) and hardware view (of physical key placements) -- is very useful. For example, when using Colemak on Windows, I can play using WASD physical keys, but many games correctly name them WARS.
thrower123 5y ago
Is Sciter related in any way to the old Scintilla/SciTE editors?
- qorrect 5y ago
  Got to be , right ?
  - c-smile 5y ago
    No. Sciter was born from my old WYSIWYG editor that I did for EverNote. Here is the story: https://sciter.com/10-years-road-to-sciter/ https://sciter.com/10-years-road-to-sciter/ and here with photo: https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-history/ https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-...
- c-smile 5y ago
  No. Sciter was born at times when term Smart Client was the thing. So it is "Smart Client, next ITERation". So it is pronounced that way: skiter.
ethanpil 5y ago
Can you give me some info on "new Sciter - the one that uses JavaScript" Last time I played with Sciter it was based on a proprietary JS engine that wasn't fully exchangeable with common JS. Is that not the case any more, and Sciter will now understand ECMA standard JS?
- c-smile 5y ago
  Please check: https://terrainformatica.com/2021/04/25/sciter-uses-javascript-from-now-and-on/ https://terrainformatica.com/2021/04/25/sciter-uses-javascri... Mainstream Sciter now uses QuickJS of Fabrice the Magnificent (https://bellard.org/quickjs/ https://bellard.org/quickjs/). QuickJS complies to ES2020 specification. And Sciter exposes most popular and modern DOM API so MithrilJS, PReactJS and other libraries work as they are. Sciter implements far not whole set of DOM API - just essential ones. In fact DOM API and so browsers are full of garbage - old historical layers of stuff from initial Netscape JS API, IE6, etc. For example there is no XMLHttpRequest but there is Fetch API : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API Sciter goal is not to support browser API as it is - with all its bells and whistles, after all desktop use cases require features that are not available in browsers anyway. But all non-UI libraries from NPM collection should work as they are in Sciter. Most of pure Vanilla JS UI components should also work as they are, for example LeafletJS (maps) https://sciter.com/sciter-js-runs-leafletjs-as-it-is/ https://sciter.com/sciter-js-runs-leafletjs-as-it-is/ Also Sciter provides rich set of built-in components like JSX, Reactor, Virtual List (https://sciter.com/behaviorvirtual-list-for-sciter-and-sciter-js/ https://sciter.com/behaviorvirtual-list-for-sciter-and-scite...) and others.
  - chj 5y ago
    Great choice of QuickJS. I would go with SQLite3 for storage though.
    - c-smile 5y ago
      Far not all applications need SQLite. And SQLite is a bit fatty. In most cases built-in Sciter's NoSQL DB is enough, see: https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/tree/main/docs/md/storage https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/tree/main/docs/md/s... . Feature set is close to MongoDB but in 60 kb. But anyway Sciter provides an option for host application to link SQLite statically and expose it to JS: https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/blob/main/demos/usciter/usciter.cpp#L82 https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/blob/main/demos/usc... as set of native objects. usciter from SDK is an example of application that has SQLite on board.
livinginfear 5y ago
This was my first question. I am an avid user of older technology, and I regularly do lots of writing for the web in HTML format. I cannot use any of the new Electron-based programs on my laptop due to their exorbitant resource usage. This program in its current form is perfect. However I would not continue to use it if it were upgraded to a modern JS based framework.
Sophistifunk 5y ago
I have a question; if I get Sciter can I use (I mean does it expose) your lower-level cross-platform abstraction instead of the DOM and CSS? I don't want to make documents, nor do I think HTML's layout(s) nor CSS are appropriate for applications. But I would very much like a cross-platform scene graph like that exposed by Flash back in the day, which I could build atop the same sort of foundation one would want underneath their CSS/DOM impl.
- c-smile 5y ago
  "lower-level cross-platform abstraction" needs some clarfication. For example Sciter exposes Graphics API https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/blob/main/include/sciter-x-graphics.h https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/blob/main/include/s..., is this close to what you mean? It allows to render stuff a la ImGUI - immediate mode painting. And what's in principle wrong with DOM? DOM is tree of lightweight nodes and elements. In Sciter each DOM element may have native controllers, known as behaviors. Examples of those: https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/tree/main/include/behaviors https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/tree/main/include/b... . So you can create single DOM node - document and attach your native behavior to it. It will receive all events and will do drawing if you want. Some applications are using mixed model: DOM where it makes sense, and custom native behavior where high performant handling is required. In fact DOM and ImGraphics have their strong points but in different situations. Sciter allows to have best of two worlds by combining them. In any case when you say "I don't need DOM", it means that you will implement it on your side. Been there, seen that many times.
  - Sophistifunk 5y ago
    Thanks for your reply. It's not that I don't want any DOM, it's that I specifically don't want "the" DOM as seen in web browsers. What I want is a scene graph without layout or CSS, but with events and transform nodes and the like. You can get close to this in web DOM just by making everything absolute and just not using CSS, but without a way to measure text before drawing it, you can't do your own layout properly. It looks like Sciter might be what I need to build on top of though, I will look into it further.
spicybright 5y ago
Honestly it seems like this would be one of the few justifications for using electron. You're literally rendering HTML, getting that as accurate as possible is a plus.
ale42 5y ago
This is the first thing I checked, and was so relieved to see that it wasn't one-more ElectronJS app wasting the resources of my PC for to simplify the life of the programmer

kjksf 5y ago

You should fix Windows portable .zip so that it's not sciter/sciter/sdk/bin/32/html-notepad.exe

flixic 5y ago

I almost wish it was Electron based. A bunch of things made the usage almost impossible. - MacOS has handy text navigation shortcuts: alt-arrow to go back a word, alt+shift+arrow to select a word, etc. These don't work, and I'm too used to them to stop using. - I'm using Colemak keyboard layout (L key inserts letter "i"), but keyboard shortcuts don't respect it. So in my mind I have to press Cmd + U ("u" is mapped to I key) to make text Italic. Again, this broke my usual habbits. - Common MacOS shortcuts (even Cmd + Q to quit) don't work. I like the ideas behind this editor, but now I hope someone ports it to HTML + JavaScript, so it works keeping all the OS-provided affordances.

c-smile 5y ago
Yes, its operation on MacOS needs some attention. In fact I've created the notepad as a demo project for Sciter SDK (https://sciter.com https://sciter.com). The same as Sciter Notes: https://notes.sciter.com https://notes.sciter.com It is just that at some point someone asked me to make distribution so I've created that web site. Another question was to understand: donation-ware, is it a sustainable solution. Apparently it is not - donation does not even cover sums asked by Apple for allowance to develop software for their platform.
unicornporn 5y ago
> alt-arrow to go back a word, alt+shift+arrow to select a word, etc. These don't work, and I'm too used to them to stop using. Will sadly make it unusable for me. Thanks for saving me the time.
- c-smile 5y ago
  If someone wants to take care about this html-notepad - please let me know. I don't mind if it will be commercial product or not - I'll help anyway. As I said - it can be ported to new Sciter (it uses JS now) as it is - relatively easy. Just drop me a message at https://sciter.com/contact_us/ https://sciter.com/contact_us/
primax 5y ago
This feels a bit like the old reddit post about how now one would ever use Dropbox because you can just roll your own FTP server. Good points though on OS tracked features.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- phist_mcgee 5y ago
  For anyone who might be interested in the referenced comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
toomanyducks 5y ago
Tangential, but for the pain of alternate keyboard layouts, I've found it easiest to use a keyboard that allows remapping of keys in hardware to alternate layouts (sends the 'wrong' keycode when you press a key). It's a bit of a hack, but it works much better than equivalent software hacks.
- flixic 5y ago
  System having "both views" -- software view (where "i" might be on key L) and hardware view (of physical key placements) -- is very useful. For example, when using Colemak on Windows, I can play using WASD physical keys, but many games correctly name them WARS.

thrower123 5y ago

Is Sciter related in any way to the old Scintilla/SciTE editors?

qorrect 5y ago
Got to be , right ?
- c-smile 5y ago
  No. Sciter was born from my old WYSIWYG editor that I did for EverNote. Here is the story: https://sciter.com/10-years-road-to-sciter/ https://sciter.com/10-years-road-to-sciter/ and here with photo: https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-history/ https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-...
c-smile 5y ago
No. Sciter was born at times when term Smart Client was the thing. So it is "Smart Client, next ITERation". So it is pronounced that way: skiter.

ethanpil 5y ago

Can you give me some info on "new Sciter - the one that uses JavaScript" Last time I played with Sciter it was based on a proprietary JS engine that wasn't fully exchangeable with common JS. Is that not the case any more, and Sciter will now understand ECMA standard JS?

c-smile 5y ago
Please check: https://terrainformatica.com/2021/04/25/sciter-uses-javascript-from-now-and-on/ https://terrainformatica.com/2021/04/25/sciter-uses-javascri... Mainstream Sciter now uses QuickJS of Fabrice the Magnificent (https://bellard.org/quickjs/ https://bellard.org/quickjs/). QuickJS complies to ES2020 specification. And Sciter exposes most popular and modern DOM API so MithrilJS, PReactJS and other libraries work as they are. Sciter implements far not whole set of DOM API - just essential ones. In fact DOM API and so browsers are full of garbage - old historical layers of stuff from initial Netscape JS API, IE6, etc. For example there is no XMLHttpRequest but there is Fetch API : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API Sciter goal is not to support browser API as it is - with all its bells and whistles, after all desktop use cases require features that are not available in browsers anyway. But all non-UI libraries from NPM collection should work as they are in Sciter. Most of pure Vanilla JS UI components should also work as they are, for example LeafletJS (maps) https://sciter.com/sciter-js-runs-leafletjs-as-it-is/ https://sciter.com/sciter-js-runs-leafletjs-as-it-is/ Also Sciter provides rich set of built-in components like JSX, Reactor, Virtual List (https://sciter.com/behaviorvirtual-list-for-sciter-and-sciter-js/ https://sciter.com/behaviorvirtual-list-for-sciter-and-scite...) and others.
- chj 5y ago
  Great choice of QuickJS. I would go with SQLite3 for storage though.
  - c-smile 5y ago
    Far not all applications need SQLite. And SQLite is a bit fatty. In most cases built-in Sciter's NoSQL DB is enough, see: https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/tree/main/docs/md/storage https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/tree/main/docs/md/s... . Feature set is close to MongoDB but in 60 kb. But anyway Sciter provides an option for host application to link SQLite statically and expose it to JS: https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/blob/main/demos/usciter/usciter.cpp#L82 https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/blob/main/demos/usc... as set of native objects. usciter from SDK is an example of application that has SQLite on board.

livinginfear 5y ago

This was my first question. I am an avid user of older technology, and I regularly do lots of writing for the web in HTML format. I cannot use any of the new Electron-based programs on my laptop due to their exorbitant resource usage. This program in its current form is perfect. However I would not continue to use it if it were upgraded to a modern JS based framework.

Sophistifunk 5y ago

I have a question; if I get Sciter can I use (I mean does it expose) your lower-level cross-platform abstraction instead of the DOM and CSS? I don't want to make documents, nor do I think HTML's layout(s) nor CSS are appropriate for applications. But I would very much like a cross-platform scene graph like that exposed by Flash back in the day, which I could build atop the same sort of foundation one would want underneath their CSS/DOM impl.

c-smile 5y ago
"lower-level cross-platform abstraction" needs some clarfication. For example Sciter exposes Graphics API https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/blob/main/include/sciter-x-graphics.h https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/blob/main/include/s..., is this close to what you mean? It allows to render stuff a la ImGUI - immediate mode painting. And what's in principle wrong with DOM? DOM is tree of lightweight nodes and elements. In Sciter each DOM element may have native controllers, known as behaviors. Examples of those: https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/tree/main/include/behaviors https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk/tree/main/include/b... . So you can create single DOM node - document and attach your native behavior to it. It will receive all events and will do drawing if you want. Some applications are using mixed model: DOM where it makes sense, and custom native behavior where high performant handling is required. In fact DOM and ImGraphics have their strong points but in different situations. Sciter allows to have best of two worlds by combining them. In any case when you say "I don't need DOM", it means that you will implement it on your side. Been there, seen that many times.
- Sophistifunk 5y ago
  Thanks for your reply. It's not that I don't want any DOM, it's that I specifically don't want "the" DOM as seen in web browsers. What I want is a scene graph without layout or CSS, but with events and transform nodes and the like. You can get close to this in web DOM just by making everything absolute and just not using CSS, but without a way to measure text before drawing it, you can't do your own layout properly. It looks like Sciter might be what I need to build on top of though, I will look into it further.

spicybright 5y ago

Honestly it seems like this would be one of the few justifications for using electron. You're literally rendering HTML, getting that as accurate as possible is a plus.

ale42 5y ago

This is the first thing I checked, and was so relieved to see that it wasn't one-more ElectronJS app wasting the resources of my PC for to simplify the life of the programmer