5 ms·

I see some electron stuff in there, looks to be another electron one? I’m genuinely curious if people just don’t care. I’m very battery aware and when I’m oper

I see some electron stuff in there, looks to be another electron one? I’m genuinely curious if people just don’t care. I’m very battery aware and when I’m operating on battery power I make a conscious decision to not use electron or chromium stuff, so: sublimetext, kitty, safari, and so on. My battery on M1Max lasts me ages this way On AC power I don’t care and have a bazillion electron things running, but I still notice a pretty big difference in battery drain when unpowered

imbnwa 3y ago
> I’m genuinely curious if people just don’t care Terminal emulator is just too competitive a market to even consider one implemented in Electron, particularly on macOS where iTerm2 exists.
- pxc 3y ago
  iTerm2 and Kitty both cover the specific kind of terminal Tabby seems to be going after in particular: 'batteries included', modernized, extended with new features, tight integration with the shell, special SSH and tmux integrations, etc. If you're into bells and whistles and moving beyond xterm's capabilities, there are multiple strong contenders for Mac, and both eschew web tech in favor of native code.
  - imbnwa 3y ago
    Yeah I run WezTerm now but came from Kitty, which is indeed wild with the features.
    - pxc 3y ago
      What made you go for Wezterm over kitty? That one's on my list of terminals to give a try in place of iTerm2 this year but I don't know much about it. (I just use DE defaults on Linux, but I'm back on macOS again at work and Wezterm is a lot more mature now than it was last time I was here.)
      - imbnwa 3y ago
        Lua config
- artdigital 3y ago
  Hyper is very popular, which is also in electron
Pannoniae 3y ago
I have a powerful desktop with good cooling. I still care. I sometimes get really annoyed when I see a non-productivity or non-game software using more than 500MB of RAM. It just doesn't have to, but it does it anyway.
- jgalt212 3y ago
  I agree. It shows lack of care.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  For the modern age indeed.
jkubicek 3y ago
I'm not sensitive to minor performance issues, but I am very sensitive to apps that don't behave like a native macOS app. I want all my preference windows to look the same, I want to use native spellchecking everywhere, I want to use the Applescript/Automator/Shortcuts that I've been adding to the services menu over the years.
tiltowait 3y ago
Writing a terminal emulator in Electron just seems like a bonkers idea to me. Heck, choosing to start a new project in Electron baffles me. Any replacement terminal emulator has an uphill battle against iTerm2 and Warp. Making it Electron is needlessly hamstringing.
- mostlysimilar 3y ago
  iTerm2 I agree with, but Warp? Does it have any real adoption? The company has taken ~$70 million in venture capital funding and the product requires an account/sign-in. Even if the product itself has good features I would not touch it.
  - jauntywundrkind 3y ago
    I watched a coworker screen share using Warp & was heavily impressed. Warp have set a big hurdle to get over by making the top-of-funnel so harsh a winnowing function. But every time I see criticism against Warp, it's one and only one point. I'm not so willing to completely rule out & discard technology because it has one particular gotcha that yes i too snobbishly would reject. Letting oneself be too quickly polarized is a weakness. We have to be willing to consider that we're wrong, that factors we think are important might not matter as much as they do. Or to consider that our perspective/assessment is wrong (such as assuming Electron is always a enormous resource hog).
    - el_memorioso 3y ago
      What in Warp heavily impressed you?
      - jauntywundrkind 3y ago
        The popover historic-sensitive autocomplete was incredibly helpful & superbly semantically aware. The separators between commands enhanced readability in ways I would never have guessed possible.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
The number of us that run vscode is very high. Vscode is exceedingly performant & efficient. I doubt I lose 20 minutes of my 8+ hour runtime on those days I switch from Neovim to Vscode fulltime. It's just not a factor, and hemming & hawing is a waste of emotion. Being a fidgety worry-wort here is a waste of my vital life energy, would make my life worse. Like any application, enough bad code can ruin a good thing. If you install a couple dozen extensions in vscode, there's some odds one or two will have a real impact on resource usage. And I think all codebases are like this: performance is fragile. It has to be cared for, ongoingly. Projects tend to become slower over time. It doesn't matter your stack, your technology: vigilance is required. Caring is required. When people think of Electron, they think of Slack. (Or maybe Discord, but honestly it's way down on my list of cpu used versus other things, and it's <200MB RSS across dozens of servers & hundreds of rooms is tiny.) These form very strong preconceptions. I wont tell you you're wrong, but you need to think very clearly about what could possibly change your mind. There's a lot of people not open to the possibility that they're wrong, that Electron has no problem and is fine, or even worse of a locking-yourself-in tragedy, could ever possibly become fine. And that's a problem. (I do wish we had a shared-library alternative to Electron, which would lower effective memory use heavily. Alas, alternatives like the well known Tauri use a woefully inferior Webkit2 engine, which is a cure far worse than the disease.)
- jemmyw 3y ago
  Vscode does a ton of stuff though and it can perhaps justify it's electron with a broad set of features, the performance work they've put in to it and that being based on electron really helped their extension ecosystem. I don't quite see the same justifications for a terminal.
  - jauntywundrkind 3y ago
    If vscode can do so much and have such a slim profile, it's hard for me to grapple with the idea that we need to justify using the same technologies for a terminal. The impact is negligible, for a massive incredibly capable & superbly complex app. Many of us spend enormous times in our terminal. If we are going to likewise have a nearly negligible impact on battery life and memory usage, it feels like such an effete elite overconcern to fret about the technology. If Tabby can create a much more malleable flexible terminal that lets us explore possibilities quickly, at such a minimal cost, I think it would be foolish to spend time weighing & "justify" that price. We should explore what possibilities this opens.
jagged-chisel 3y ago
> Neither is it lightweight - if RAM usage is of importance, consider Conemu or Alacritty This speaks volumes
rubicks 3y ago
I am fundamentally and ideologically opposed to using a terminal emulator implemented in electron. If you feel similarly, then you might enjoy https://st.suckless.org/ https://st.suckless.org/
- kaba0 3y ago
  I believe the suckless project is going way into the other direction. There is a reasonable middle ground of having proper, 21st century features, yet not using much more resources than needed. Konsole, alacritty, gnome-terminal all manage to struck that niche well.
thefz 3y ago
> I’m genuinely curious if people just don’t care. Won't touch that application with a stick, especially from my laptop.

imbnwa 3y ago

> I’m genuinely curious if people just don’t care Terminal emulator is just too competitive a market to even consider one implemented in Electron, particularly on macOS where iTerm2 exists.

pxc 3y ago
iTerm2 and Kitty both cover the specific kind of terminal Tabby seems to be going after in particular: 'batteries included', modernized, extended with new features, tight integration with the shell, special SSH and tmux integrations, etc. If you're into bells and whistles and moving beyond xterm's capabilities, there are multiple strong contenders for Mac, and both eschew web tech in favor of native code.
- imbnwa 3y ago
  Yeah I run WezTerm now but came from Kitty, which is indeed wild with the features.
  - pxc 3y ago
    What made you go for Wezterm over kitty? That one's on my list of terminals to give a try in place of iTerm2 this year but I don't know much about it. (I just use DE defaults on Linux, but I'm back on macOS again at work and Wezterm is a lot more mature now than it was last time I was here.)
    - imbnwa 3y ago
      Lua config
artdigital 3y ago
Hyper is very popular, which is also in electron

Pannoniae 3y ago

I have a powerful desktop with good cooling. I still care. I sometimes get really annoyed when I see a non-productivity or non-game software using more than 500MB of RAM. It just doesn't have to, but it does it anyway.

jgalt212 3y ago
I agree. It shows lack of care.
nerdponx 3y ago
For the modern age indeed.

jkubicek 3y ago

I'm not sensitive to minor performance issues, but I am very sensitive to apps that don't behave like a native macOS app. I want all my preference windows to look the same, I want to use native spellchecking everywhere, I want to use the Applescript/Automator/Shortcuts that I've been adding to the services menu over the years.

tiltowait 3y ago

Writing a terminal emulator in Electron just seems like a bonkers idea to me. Heck, choosing to start a new project in Electron baffles me. Any replacement terminal emulator has an uphill battle against iTerm2 and Warp. Making it Electron is needlessly hamstringing.

mostlysimilar 3y ago
iTerm2 I agree with, but Warp? Does it have any real adoption? The company has taken ~$70 million in venture capital funding and the product requires an account/sign-in. Even if the product itself has good features I would not touch it.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  I watched a coworker screen share using Warp & was heavily impressed. Warp have set a big hurdle to get over by making the top-of-funnel so harsh a winnowing function. But every time I see criticism against Warp, it's one and only one point. I'm not so willing to completely rule out & discard technology because it has one particular gotcha that yes i too snobbishly would reject. Letting oneself be too quickly polarized is a weakness. We have to be willing to consider that we're wrong, that factors we think are important might not matter as much as they do. Or to consider that our perspective/assessment is wrong (such as assuming Electron is always a enormous resource hog).
  - el_memorioso 3y ago
    What in Warp heavily impressed you?
    - jauntywundrkind 3y ago
      The popover historic-sensitive autocomplete was incredibly helpful & superbly semantically aware. The separators between commands enhanced readability in ways I would never have guessed possible.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

The number of us that run vscode is very high. Vscode is exceedingly performant & efficient. I doubt I lose 20 minutes of my 8+ hour runtime on those days I switch from Neovim to Vscode fulltime. It's just not a factor, and hemming & hawing is a waste of emotion. Being a fidgety worry-wort here is a waste of my vital life energy, would make my life worse. Like any application, enough bad code can ruin a good thing. If you install a couple dozen extensions in vscode, there's some odds one or two will have a real impact on resource usage. And I think all codebases are like this: performance is fragile. It has to be cared for, ongoingly. Projects tend to become slower over time. It doesn't matter your stack, your technology: vigilance is required. Caring is required. When people think of Electron, they think of Slack. (Or maybe Discord, but honestly it's way down on my list of cpu used versus other things, and it's <200MB RSS across dozens of servers & hundreds of rooms is tiny.) These form very strong preconceptions. I wont tell you you're wrong, but you need to think very clearly about what could possibly change your mind. There's a lot of people not open to the possibility that they're wrong, that Electron has no problem and is fine, or even worse of a locking-yourself-in tragedy, could ever possibly become fine. And that's a problem. (I do wish we had a shared-library alternative to Electron, which would lower effective memory use heavily. Alas, alternatives like the well known Tauri use a woefully inferior Webkit2 engine, which is a cure far worse than the disease.)

jemmyw 3y ago
Vscode does a ton of stuff though and it can perhaps justify it's electron with a broad set of features, the performance work they've put in to it and that being based on electron really helped their extension ecosystem. I don't quite see the same justifications for a terminal.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  If vscode can do so much and have such a slim profile, it's hard for me to grapple with the idea that we need to justify using the same technologies for a terminal. The impact is negligible, for a massive incredibly capable & superbly complex app. Many of us spend enormous times in our terminal. If we are going to likewise have a nearly negligible impact on battery life and memory usage, it feels like such an effete elite overconcern to fret about the technology. If Tabby can create a much more malleable flexible terminal that lets us explore possibilities quickly, at such a minimal cost, I think it would be foolish to spend time weighing & "justify" that price. We should explore what possibilities this opens.

jagged-chisel 3y ago

> Neither is it lightweight - if RAM usage is of importance, consider Conemu or Alacritty This speaks volumes

rubicks 3y ago

I am fundamentally and ideologically opposed to using a terminal emulator implemented in electron. If you feel similarly, then you might enjoy https://st.suckless.org/ https://st.suckless.org/

kaba0 3y ago
I believe the suckless project is going way into the other direction. There is a reasonable middle ground of having proper, 21st century features, yet not using much more resources than needed. Konsole, alacritty, gnome-terminal all manage to struck that niche well.

thefz 3y ago

> I’m genuinely curious if people just don’t care. Won't touch that application with a stick, especially from my laptop.