7 ms·

It's what kickstarted Electron which eventually gave us VSCode, Slack, and lots of HN comments about memory usage. It also had the sweetest default theme of any

by jstx1 4y ago

It's what kickstarted Electron which eventually gave us VSCode, Slack, and lots of HN comments about memory usage. It also had the sweetest default theme of any code editor. RIP.

antileet 4y ago
Electron was originally known as "Atom Shell"!
- davidkunz 4y ago
  Ha, that makes sense from a physics perspective as electrons orbit the nucleus.
  - d82nsjk9 4y ago
faizshah 4y ago
Does anyone remember brackets? I cant remember if brackets or atom came first but I remember switching from sublime to brackets to atom. Good times, I heard DHH is still using TextMate.
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  Brackets came first.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  I do, it was quite cool! What stuck most with me is the CSS color picker.
- ketzo 4y ago
  Did my first ever paid programming work in Brackets, helping some friends build a Wordpress blog. Good times.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  I still use Textmate, think it's actually excellent these days and still updated a few times a year. Spellcheck always works, nothing ever crashes and acts weird I run it for 10+ months without issue. VSCode on my PC the spell check is inconsistent and weird and on a long enough timeline it actually crashes the whole operating system if you leave it open.
- ngc248 4y ago
  I am still using brackets on the mac and I have to say very satisfied with it. I came from windows where notepad++ is unbeatable.
- IncRnd 4y ago
  I've used TextMate for a long time. It works great.
  - ubermonkey 4y ago
    I was in TextMate all day every day for a long, long time but gradually shifted to Emacs, hilariously, AFTER I quit coding for a living -- because of OrgMode.
    - IncRnd 4y ago
      That is hilarious!
      - ubermonkey 4y ago
        Right? I mean, I tried to become an emacs person several times when I was still coding, and it just never took. My last phase of programming work was on OS X, so I had friendlier yet still capable options like TextMate, which made shifting to emacs a pretty hard ask. Then my job shifted to a point where my preferred method of tracking activites/tasks/notes was just falling apart. I was all-in on the GTD-inspired Omnifocus, but what I really wanted was a system where I could intermingle notes with Todo items, and then ask the system to collate a list of the Todos for me dynamically. Which, as it turns out, is pretty much a description of how OrgMode works. And, sadly, almost nothing else that I've found, and so I use emacs all the time now. My emacs expertise, though, is pretty limited to things I need to know to be productive with Org.
- mjmsmith 4y ago
  I still use TextMate, mainly for the excellent search & replace preview.
- dangoor 4y ago
  I worked on Brackets full time at Adobe. It came before Atom and had a bit of a different target (designers-who-code vs. developers in general). Brackets was great fun, but it too ultimately needed to be sunsetted. Brackets was the foundation of Adobe Edge Code, which was part of Creative Cloud, so there were some bigger plans there.
  - niutech 4y ago
    Is it officially sunsetted? I can still see commits on Github: https://github.com/brackets-cont/brackets https://github.com/brackets-cont/brackets Thank you for developing Brackets! I used it daily as a web dev, it had an awesome live preview feature.
    - dangoor 4y ago
      Oh, that's a good point about the sunsetting. In Brackets's case, Adobe left it active in the hands of the community. Live Preview in particular is one of the areas I had some fun working on. I worked out a way to do diff/patch to make it quickly and incrementally update the browser[1] [1]: https://github.com/adobe/brackets/wiki/Research%3A-HTML-DOM-Data-Structure https://github.com/adobe/brackets/wiki/Research%3A-HTML-DOM-...
- zikani_03 4y ago
  Brackets was cool and will always be in my memory; made a close friend (who we eventually hired to become a co-worker) because I mentioned that I was working on a Brackets extension on a Facebook group.
skohan 4y ago
Electron is both an amazing enabling technology, and also an artifact of the sad state of affairs for computing platforms. One could imagine a world where strong standards have been established which would allow you to easily deploy lean native applications across a wide variety of platforms. Instead we ended up in this bizzare world where if you want to maintain a desktop GUI app, you either need a large team to support multiple platforms, or you need to target minified javascript of all things, and run your software on top of a large, arcane compatibility layer.
- dijit 4y ago
  I still think of these inefficient things as being great multipliers of potential, even if wasteful. FWIW: I'm probably one of the most "IT Conservative" people on this site, I still believe in sysadmins, dislike systemd, hate electron etc; But there is something to be said about developer productivity: if you can build a prototype in 10 days when it would have taken 10 weeks that can be a huge differentiator between companies; it means you can make 6x more prototypes in the same time window, or work through different iterations of the same idea. That's hugely beneficial. I think if you treat inefficient things this way (I consider Ruby/Python in the same way) then we all benefit, test your ideas then go for gold on a more efficient platform.
  - skohan 4y ago
    Yeah I think I am in a similar camp. As a person involved in product development, I love the speed at which web technologies allow us to move. As a computer scientist, I can't help but cringe at the massive amount of collective inefficiency in the current state of computing. But don't get me wrong, I'd rather have the inefficient thing which creates value than nothing at all.
- vdnkh 4y ago
  > One could imagine a world where strong standards have been established w And yet this didn't happen and Electron did. The "free market" of FOSS development settled on Electron as the winner for cross-platform development.
marricks 4y ago
Also all have the same magnitude of latency and lag. At least you know if one of them bugs you, they all will.
- dewey 4y ago
  There's a bunch of Electron powered apps that feel really snappy, definitely faster and snappier than some default apps Apple ships on macOS these days. Examples for me would be: VSCode and Linear
  - marricks 4y ago
    I should have put the example I was comparing to: VIM. I like VIM as an editor because it's extremely fast and works well once you adapt to it. I'm sure VSCode and Linear are fast, nice, and fine. I just hated the lag/latency compared to my terminal text editor.
  - redox99 4y ago
    A few Electron apps are acceptable. But it's still very noticeable how less responsive they are compared to Win32 programs.
niutech 4y ago
Before Electron (f.k.a. Atom-Shell), there was Node-Webkit (l.k.a. NW.js), which also was a foundation for plenty of apps: https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/wiki/List-of-apps-and-companies-using-nw.js https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/wiki/List-of-apps-and-companie...

by jstx1 4y ago

It's what kickstarted Electron which eventually gave us VSCode, Slack, and lots of HN comments about memory usage. It also had the sweetest default theme of any code editor. RIP.

antileet 4y ago

Electron was originally known as "Atom Shell"!

davidkunz 4y ago
Ha, that makes sense from a physics perspective as electrons orbit the nucleus.
- d82nsjk9 4y ago

faizshah 4y ago

Does anyone remember brackets? I cant remember if brackets or atom came first but I remember switching from sublime to brackets to atom. Good times, I heard DHH is still using TextMate.

throw_m239339 4y ago
Brackets came first.
solarkraft 4y ago
I do, it was quite cool! What stuck most with me is the CSS color picker.
ketzo 4y ago
Did my first ever paid programming work in Brackets, helping some friends build a Wordpress blog. Good times.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
I still use Textmate, think it's actually excellent these days and still updated a few times a year. Spellcheck always works, nothing ever crashes and acts weird I run it for 10+ months without issue. VSCode on my PC the spell check is inconsistent and weird and on a long enough timeline it actually crashes the whole operating system if you leave it open.
ngc248 4y ago
I am still using brackets on the mac and I have to say very satisfied with it. I came from windows where notepad++ is unbeatable.
IncRnd 4y ago
I've used TextMate for a long time. It works great.
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  I was in TextMate all day every day for a long, long time but gradually shifted to Emacs, hilariously, AFTER I quit coding for a living -- because of OrgMode.
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    That is hilarious!
    - ubermonkey 4y ago
      Right? I mean, I tried to become an emacs person several times when I was still coding, and it just never took. My last phase of programming work was on OS X, so I had friendlier yet still capable options like TextMate, which made shifting to emacs a pretty hard ask. Then my job shifted to a point where my preferred method of tracking activites/tasks/notes was just falling apart. I was all-in on the GTD-inspired Omnifocus, but what I really wanted was a system where I could intermingle notes with Todo items, and then ask the system to collate a list of the Todos for me dynamically. Which, as it turns out, is pretty much a description of how OrgMode works. And, sadly, almost nothing else that I've found, and so I use emacs all the time now. My emacs expertise, though, is pretty limited to things I need to know to be productive with Org.
mjmsmith 4y ago
I still use TextMate, mainly for the excellent search & replace preview.
dangoor 4y ago
I worked on Brackets full time at Adobe. It came before Atom and had a bit of a different target (designers-who-code vs. developers in general). Brackets was great fun, but it too ultimately needed to be sunsetted. Brackets was the foundation of Adobe Edge Code, which was part of Creative Cloud, so there were some bigger plans there.
- niutech 4y ago
  Is it officially sunsetted? I can still see commits on Github: https://github.com/brackets-cont/brackets https://github.com/brackets-cont/brackets Thank you for developing Brackets! I used it daily as a web dev, it had an awesome live preview feature.
  - dangoor 4y ago
    Oh, that's a good point about the sunsetting. In Brackets's case, Adobe left it active in the hands of the community. Live Preview in particular is one of the areas I had some fun working on. I worked out a way to do diff/patch to make it quickly and incrementally update the browser[1] [1]: https://github.com/adobe/brackets/wiki/Research%3A-HTML-DOM-Data-Structure https://github.com/adobe/brackets/wiki/Research%3A-HTML-DOM-...
zikani_03 4y ago
Brackets was cool and will always be in my memory; made a close friend (who we eventually hired to become a co-worker) because I mentioned that I was working on a Brackets extension on a Facebook group.

skohan 4y ago

Electron is both an amazing enabling technology, and also an artifact of the sad state of affairs for computing platforms. One could imagine a world where strong standards have been established which would allow you to easily deploy lean native applications across a wide variety of platforms. Instead we ended up in this bizzare world where if you want to maintain a desktop GUI app, you either need a large team to support multiple platforms, or you need to target minified javascript of all things, and run your software on top of a large, arcane compatibility layer.

dijit 4y ago
I still think of these inefficient things as being great multipliers of potential, even if wasteful. FWIW: I'm probably one of the most "IT Conservative" people on this site, I still believe in sysadmins, dislike systemd, hate electron etc; But there is something to be said about developer productivity: if you can build a prototype in 10 days when it would have taken 10 weeks that can be a huge differentiator between companies; it means you can make 6x more prototypes in the same time window, or work through different iterations of the same idea. That's hugely beneficial. I think if you treat inefficient things this way (I consider Ruby/Python in the same way) then we all benefit, test your ideas then go for gold on a more efficient platform.
- skohan 4y ago
  Yeah I think I am in a similar camp. As a person involved in product development, I love the speed at which web technologies allow us to move. As a computer scientist, I can't help but cringe at the massive amount of collective inefficiency in the current state of computing. But don't get me wrong, I'd rather have the inefficient thing which creates value than nothing at all.
vdnkh 4y ago
> One could imagine a world where strong standards have been established w And yet this didn't happen and Electron did. The "free market" of FOSS development settled on Electron as the winner for cross-platform development.

marricks 4y ago

Also all have the same magnitude of latency and lag. At least you know if one of them bugs you, they all will.

dewey 4y ago
There's a bunch of Electron powered apps that feel really snappy, definitely faster and snappier than some default apps Apple ships on macOS these days. Examples for me would be: VSCode and Linear
- marricks 4y ago
  I should have put the example I was comparing to: VIM. I like VIM as an editor because it's extremely fast and works well once you adapt to it. I'm sure VSCode and Linear are fast, nice, and fine. I just hated the lag/latency compared to my terminal text editor.
- redox99 4y ago
  A few Electron apps are acceptable. But it's still very noticeable how less responsive they are compared to Win32 programs.

niutech 4y ago

Before Electron (f.k.a. Atom-Shell), there was Node-Webkit (l.k.a. NW.js), which also was a foundation for plenty of apps: https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/wiki/List-of-apps-and-companies-using-nw.js https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/wiki/List-of-apps-and-companie...