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Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

How about the fact that your computer now has three enormous copies of chromium on it for no good reason?

If you have the RAM for it and the software works well, who cares? Plus, it seems potential improvements are coming in this area.

https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/673

On the one hand side people complain that Turbo Pascal and WordPerfect (or even UNIX for that matter) worked extremely fast on an 386SX with 4MB RAM and that modern software eats hundreds of megabytes of memory and seems slower, without providing much new functionality.

This attitude (replacing a lean and fast terminal, by one rendered using a web browser engine) is exactly why modern machines that are 1000x faster and with 1000x the memory still seem to be slow for basic tasks.

Of course, it's a free choice. You can waste resources by replacing small programs by browsers ;). But it's reasonable that many people find it a waste.

> no good reason.

Well thats subjective. I might not be as cool as you but I get my work done using these tools.

I think he's saying you only need one version of Chromium on your machine to run all these tools.

My Visual Studio Code app is 138MB. On the grand scale of things, I'm not that worried about multiple copies of Chromium.

Electron by itself weighs in around 100mb. iTerm2 is a packed to the gills with features terminal that is 13mb.

I can honestly say that I have never been inconvenienced even slightly by an application that takes up between 0 and 500mb on disk.

If it starts to get into the multi-GB range it can hurt to download, but below that it's all identical to me. If it means that i don't need to run a specific version of a library installed globally on my machine, and i don't need to manage a big chain of dependencies myself, and it runs on multiple platforms, i don't care if it's 1mb or 500mb, and i don't care how many copies of it I'm running.

My ssd has 60gb remaining on it after a few years of daily use and i haven't needed to worry about program space yet.

My iTerm process is using about 170mb of memory, though that's admittedly less than half of what Slack is using. Big picture, with 8gb of ram, this is not a problem.

I have 6 terminals open right now and that's my baseline. I often go up to 12-15 terms.

Presumably, multiple tabs in this browser based terminal would only use one chrome process

Talking about seperate windows here.

On my system, a long running Slack process uses about as much memory as a Finder window.

On mac, slack uses macgap, not electron.

Was this a recent change? Because electron's homepage[0] still shows that Slack was built on it.

[0]: http://electron.atom.io/

On windows (and I guess on linux) they use electron.

But what about power usage? Battery life is important.

I can't say I've measured it quantitatively, but it doesn't appear to have a huge effect, but I also don't need to be untethered all day long.

When I check the battery status on my Mac, only Chrome is listed in the "Apps that use significant energy" list.

How many copies of unix (partitions, vms, containers) do you have on your computer?

TinyCore Linux is 12 MB. A fully functional Unix(-like) system, including an X server.

So, for one Javascript-written terminal app, you can install a full Linux system with X and a window manager 10 times (Hyperterm.app is 122 MB).

One?

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