4 ms·

Just another one in an endless stream of bloatware Electron markdown text editors. Stop giving these projects recognition.

tunesmith 5y ago
Why, because it's Electron? I thought the anti-Electron stance had been debunked a while ago, that it's not every Electron app that chews up RAM like crazy, etc. Electron seems like a great way to get a cross-platform app out there without having to hire three separate departments of code developers.
- bluepizza 5y ago
  > I thought the anti-Electron stance had been debunked a while ago Nope.
- comeonseriously 5y ago
  Is there a shortage of polyglots?
  - feupan 5y ago
    However you slice it, unless you use a cross-platform system you’re going to write and test some code three times. Or four. Or five. I love native apps, but it’s hardly a difficult choice to make for a business. Only nerds like us notice apps that use gigabytes of ram. Spotify is on every platform and probably they wrote that interface once. That’s a gigantic win for everyone involved.
    - upbeat_general 5y ago
      Not quite. Only nerds like us notice that apps use gigabytes of ram. Everyone notices when apps are slow, especially when the system goes to the page file. 8GB of ram is very typical being the base spec in most laptops today.
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  Slack on the desktop continues to be a prominent unnecessary resource hog (just watch top -u with Slack open in the background). If Electron wants to shed its reputation, they should consider engaging with the Slack team, since it’s the primary unavoidable Electron app for a lot of us.
  - AnonHP 5y ago
    Add MS Teams to that list. It’s got a poor UX, is sluggish, and makes the system sluggish.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Just place all Electron apps where they deserve to be and run them from the browser directly. The only one I cannot do it is VSCode.
      - rumwerfer 5y ago
        Now you can https://vscode.dev/ https://vscode.dev/
- smoldesu 5y ago
  > it's not every Electron app that chews up RAM like crazy Let's see, Discord uses 450mb of memory after being open for 3 hours, and Spotify has gone through 1.6gb after 8. If these people with infinite resources at their disposal can't do good resource management, I'm not sure who out there is "debunking" the fact that running a web browser as a wrapper for your application is (surprise surprise!) resource heavy.
  - charrondev 5y ago
    450 doesn’t seem like a crazy amount to me for what discord is. You can be flipping through 10+ servers each with 10k+ users in it, hopping back and forth between real time voice chat, video chat/streaming, and chat with huge images/gifs in it. Too be honest I wouldn’t be surprised if gif rendering is one of the most memory intensive parts of the app. They have them everywhere and people paying for their premium subscriptions get a 50Mb upload cap and they will store the full uncompressed version of that resource and display it in the chat (although I think you have to click to load resources over 8Mb).
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      > You can be flipping through 10+ servers each with 10k+ users in it, hopping back and forth between real time voice chat, video chat/streaming, and chat with huge images/gifs in it. It will do it even without lots of users or voice or video. And you're not really going to have more than five images on screen at once. > they will store the full uncompressed version of that resource and display it in the chat So don't do that.
  - manigandham 5y ago
    How do you think Spotify gets the music for you to listen to? Or Discord gets the content to show you? The UI is not where the resources are used, but rather the active connections continuously streaming and caching content for you to consume.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  The only Electron application people can mention that’s actually good, seems to VSCode. Electron has it’s place, but I think you can go to small. VSCode can use 2GB of memory, because it’s an IDE with a ton of feature. The overhead of Electron doesn’t matter in the context of an IDE. For a markdown editor, Electron alone will push the system resources way above what’s reasonable. Then there’s the problem that Electron application fails to provide a native look and feel on all platforms. I don’t know that the look and feel can be fixed. Solutions like QT and WXWidgets never really got it right, so assuming the Electron can seems unrealistic. What can be fix is resource requirements and performance. We should push for a more lightweight Electron, if we want to use it for smaller application.
ipsum2 5y ago
Just because you don't find it useful, doesn't mean others won't either. I use Marktext on a daily basis and think its a great tool, after comparing it to what's available in OSS. I haven't had any Electron-related issues with it.
- timeon 5y ago
  > I haven't had any Electron-related issues with it. Maybe you just do not consider wasting energy as an issue?
  - ipsum2 5y ago
    The amount of energy used by Electron is minuscule compared to bitcoin mining, electric heating, driving cars, food production, or literally any other activity humans do that I can't tell if you're trolling.
pjmlp 5y ago
This one even prouds itself of being "fast".
dtgriscom 5y ago
That's a really broad opinion you've got there. At the moment, I have Mark Text running on my Mac, and it's using 0.0% of a CPU (I have over a dozen processes using more power, totaling about 5% of a CPU). It's a reasonable choice not to use this (free) product because of disk usage (285MB, which is a lot, although I have 275GB free), memory usage (165MB, although it's compressed to about 65MB) or CPU usage (see above). But others may decide that this app provides great value for the resources used, and that's also a reasonable choice. There's no reason to shut down the discussion.

tunesmith 5y ago

Why, because it's Electron? I thought the anti-Electron stance had been debunked a while ago, that it's not every Electron app that chews up RAM like crazy, etc. Electron seems like a great way to get a cross-platform app out there without having to hire three separate departments of code developers.

bluepizza 5y ago
> I thought the anti-Electron stance had been debunked a while ago Nope.
comeonseriously 5y ago
Is there a shortage of polyglots?
- feupan 5y ago
  However you slice it, unless you use a cross-platform system you’re going to write and test some code three times. Or four. Or five. I love native apps, but it’s hardly a difficult choice to make for a business. Only nerds like us notice apps that use gigabytes of ram. Spotify is on every platform and probably they wrote that interface once. That’s a gigantic win for everyone involved.
  - upbeat_general 5y ago
    Not quite. Only nerds like us notice that apps use gigabytes of ram. Everyone notices when apps are slow, especially when the system goes to the page file. 8GB of ram is very typical being the base spec in most laptops today.
KerrAvon 5y ago
Slack on the desktop continues to be a prominent unnecessary resource hog (just watch top -u with Slack open in the background). If Electron wants to shed its reputation, they should consider engaging with the Slack team, since it’s the primary unavoidable Electron app for a lot of us.
- AnonHP 5y ago
  Add MS Teams to that list. It’s got a poor UX, is sluggish, and makes the system sluggish.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Just place all Electron apps where they deserve to be and run them from the browser directly. The only one I cannot do it is VSCode.
    - rumwerfer 5y ago
      Now you can https://vscode.dev/ https://vscode.dev/
smoldesu 5y ago
> it's not every Electron app that chews up RAM like crazy Let's see, Discord uses 450mb of memory after being open for 3 hours, and Spotify has gone through 1.6gb after 8. If these people with infinite resources at their disposal can't do good resource management, I'm not sure who out there is "debunking" the fact that running a web browser as a wrapper for your application is (surprise surprise!) resource heavy.
- charrondev 5y ago
  450 doesn’t seem like a crazy amount to me for what discord is. You can be flipping through 10+ servers each with 10k+ users in it, hopping back and forth between real time voice chat, video chat/streaming, and chat with huge images/gifs in it. Too be honest I wouldn’t be surprised if gif rendering is one of the most memory intensive parts of the app. They have them everywhere and people paying for their premium subscriptions get a 50Mb upload cap and they will store the full uncompressed version of that resource and display it in the chat (although I think you have to click to load resources over 8Mb).
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    > You can be flipping through 10+ servers each with 10k+ users in it, hopping back and forth between real time voice chat, video chat/streaming, and chat with huge images/gifs in it. It will do it even without lots of users or voice or video. And you're not really going to have more than five images on screen at once. > they will store the full uncompressed version of that resource and display it in the chat So don't do that.
- manigandham 5y ago
  How do you think Spotify gets the music for you to listen to? Or Discord gets the content to show you? The UI is not where the resources are used, but rather the active connections continuously streaming and caching content for you to consume.
mrweasel 5y ago
The only Electron application people can mention that’s actually good, seems to VSCode. Electron has it’s place, but I think you can go to small. VSCode can use 2GB of memory, because it’s an IDE with a ton of feature. The overhead of Electron doesn’t matter in the context of an IDE. For a markdown editor, Electron alone will push the system resources way above what’s reasonable. Then there’s the problem that Electron application fails to provide a native look and feel on all platforms. I don’t know that the look and feel can be fixed. Solutions like QT and WXWidgets never really got it right, so assuming the Electron can seems unrealistic. What can be fix is resource requirements and performance. We should push for a more lightweight Electron, if we want to use it for smaller application.

ipsum2 5y ago

Just because you don't find it useful, doesn't mean others won't either. I use Marktext on a daily basis and think its a great tool, after comparing it to what's available in OSS. I haven't had any Electron-related issues with it.

timeon 5y ago
> I haven't had any Electron-related issues with it. Maybe you just do not consider wasting energy as an issue?
- ipsum2 5y ago
  The amount of energy used by Electron is minuscule compared to bitcoin mining, electric heating, driving cars, food production, or literally any other activity humans do that I can't tell if you're trolling.

pjmlp 5y ago

This one even prouds itself of being "fast".

dtgriscom 5y ago

That's a really broad opinion you've got there. At the moment, I have Mark Text running on my Mac, and it's using 0.0% of a CPU (I have over a dozen processes using more power, totaling about 5% of a CPU). It's a reasonable choice not to use this (free) product because of disk usage (285MB, which is a lot, although I have 275GB free), memory usage (165MB, although it's compressed to about 65MB) or CPU usage (see above). But others may decide that this app provides great value for the resources used, and that's also a reasonable choice. There's no reason to shut down the discussion.