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Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

I upvoted you to try to offset the misguided downvotes. That is indeed the worst thing about VS Code.

I have my computer configured so that most file types open in Sublime Text for that reason. For projects with a lot of TypeScript I'll open a project folder in VSCode, and then just leave it open indefinitely. Because that part is annoyingly slow, as you say.

I find it less annoying than Slack, though — seems to me that once VSCode is open and focused on what you want, it is a lot faster than Slack at all the basic operations (switching files/channels, searching, etc). Slack feels more like most other Electron apps I have tried — slow enough at just about every little thing to be constantly annoying.

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Why do people use desktop Slack? I always run it my browser, I just don't see the value proposition of a native application?

For me it's just saving me from minor inconveniences. Things like having an app I can easily switch to instead of flicking through many browser windows/tabs to dig it out.

Don't it get lost or closed by mistake all the time? To me much of the value of a separate app is being able to cmd+tab between application and I frequently just close my browser be get remove all windows and tabs.

I like the compartmentalisation of separate apps, but I doesn't really care if it's written as an Electron app, as long as reacts fast enough.

Not OP, but my browser is open pretty much all the time, and pinning tabs ensures they don't get lost.

So today I just learned you can pin tabs :)

I have GitHub, slack, Gmail, calendar and JIRA always pinned. That’s my most used web apps.

Can’t imagine them each having a desktop app. I would just get lost switching tabs.

Next lesson: you can switch to the n'th tab using Alt+<n> (or perhaps a different modifier key depending on browser and OS). Since pinned tabs appear on the left-hand side, that means you'll always have e.g. Alt+1 for email, Alt+2 for calendar, etc.

(Nice and related is that you can do Super+<n> for window switching in at least Windows and Ubuntu.)

Pinned tabs still get closed with Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+W, which is a bit of a drag.

I make SSB apps for my most used websites, for me it's much faster than:

- switch to chrome

- switch to chrome window with pinned tab

- switch to pinned tab

SSB?

"Single-site browser", or "site specific browser".

Basically a very thin wrapper over the systems web view.

Me, too. For instance, I use a site-specific browser for:

- CircleCI

- GitHub

- JIRA (blecch, but I have to use it...)

- AWS

- Google Docs (for work, and the rare personal use of Google stuff can just happen in one of the general browsers I am using)

...and others.

The OS does a much better job of partitioning windows and groups of windows than a browser typically does. You can easily keep switch between groups of windows, or keep them in their own workspace/desktop, etc.

Plus you can keep your cookies and saved passwords isolated between the environments... the browser handling AWS doesn't need to store or have access to the pasword for my Google account, and so on. For production type apps you can disable saved passwords entirely.

It is incredibly useful, and the only thing I worry about is that on macOS (my main workstation OS) there is only one good solution for this I know of: Epichrome, which seems to be a one-man side project:

https://github.com/dmarmor/epichrome

Other solutions that I know of don't save passwords, or don't keep password/cookie stores separated between the browser instances.

(I think Chrome can do this by itself on other platforms.)

See MacPin (https://github.com/kfix/MacPin/tree/swift2.3) and FluidApp (http://fluidapp.com/).

And yes, Chrome, at least on windows, has an `--app` switch.

The Chrome --app switch doesn't work on Mac.

FluidApp can't save passwords.

MacPin looks interesting! Thanks, will check it out. However, Safari-based browsers have a horrible show-stopping flaw; they don't (yet) support pasting images into web applications. This is why I love Safari for browsing and reading, but can't bear to use it for JIRA, GitHub, etc.

In Chrome (and thus Epichrome), you just hit your screen capture shortcut (Cmd-Shift-Ctrl-4 by default on macOS), select a rect of the screen to copy, and paste. Boom! Your bug report or GitHub comment now has an image pasted into it.

In Safari, you have to hit your screen capture shortcut, open Preview or similar app, create a new image, save it as a file, then go back to the web app and upload the image.

There's something deeply, horrifically wrong with that workflow.

Uh, I believe Cmd-Shift-4 saves the image directly to the desktop, then I usually hit one of my hot corners that shows the desktop, grab it, hit the corner again and drop in the image. It's usually pretty quick. I did not know about holding Ctrl copies the file, I'll probably use that more often now because it probably is a little faster. But if you want to save an image you don't have to open up preview to save it or anything.

I just use the --app flag for Chrome. Basically gets me an SSB, but still lets me right-click to open links in different profiles.

I try to offload as much stuff from the web and into the desktop because it means I can do all my window management with cmd+tab and Spectacle. If something lives in the browser I have a second layer to manage with ctrl+tab, slowing me and increasing mental load.

My full setup is cmd+tab for application switching, Spectacle for window ordering, and ctrl+arrows for switching Spaces. Space 1 is my 'grab-bag' desktop, Space 2 is my browser windows, Space 3 is all my code editing stuff, Space 4 is messaging (Telegram/IRC/Slack) Space 5 is Spotify and Space 6 is Mail and Calendar. All applications are 'pinned' to only open in their respective Space, but can be dragged to another one manually. I like to think of it as a best-of-both worlds hybrid between stacking window management and tiling window management :)

To me a native application just feels more... native. If everything is in the browser then the OS just becomes a secondary thing.

> native application

Since when is Electron running a web view a native application?

I can see that if you close your editor often. I don't.

By the way checkout GitLens on VS Code.

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