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Comment by Cyberdog | Hacker News Reader

Fair warning that this is an Electron app. (Downvotes incoming!)

For what it's worth, I use Insomnia every day with some pretty large requests and I've never had an issue with it.

With this, VSCode, Slack & Boostnote - a good portion of my daily work is done in Electron apps and I can't say I'm itching to switch to native alternatives.

Definitely appreciate how people have issues with it, but it doesn't seem like it's going away and hopefully will only get better.

Slack is a huge hog on my system, but I have more than 2 channels(?) on my slack

srsly. If I let slack run for a couple weeks, it will easily grab several GB of memory. That is insane.

Hit Command+R to refresh Slack and it'll release any memory it was accidentally holding onto. It's basically a page refresh.

I really don't get this hate for Electron.

When it's used well (VS Code) it works like anything else, when it isn't (Atom) it doesn't.

It might use more memory, but as developers we usually have GBs of spare RAM, isn't it there to be used anyway? A lot of apps on Linux are available because Electron makes porting easy.

I think it's a great technology.

I suppose Linux users are used to apps each having their own UI quirks to a certain extent, but as a Mac user, Electron apps stick out like a sore thumb and most certainly don't "work like anything else."

Taking your "used well" example of VS Code as an example, any Mac user trying to seriously use it for more than a minute will find plenty of problems. The scroll bars are thicker and more boxy and do not auto-hide; the cursor appearance is different (the line is too thick and fades in and out instead of just blinking); the page-up and page-down behavior is different (the cursor moves rather than just staying in place; infuriating!); what gets selected when you double- or triple-click on bits of code is different. Some people can get over this sort of stuff and use it anyway. I, personally, cannot.

Been using VS Code on a mac for over a year now and literally nothing you mentioned is true for me with the exception of the scroll bar being thicker than the OS default, but it does autohide.

It has been a couple months since the last time I tried it, so I gave it a download to see if my complaints have been fixed. It looks like the only one that has (or, more likely, I misremembered) is the fading cursor - but it's still too thick, it still moves when doing pgup/pgdn, selection on clicking still behaves differently, and the scroll bar is still most definitely visible. Also, there's that weird page-high gap when scrolling to the end of a file - I had forgotten about that one.

I know VS Code is highly customizable; is it possible you installed some customizations to make it behave more Mac-like?

I was on a Mac until a month ago and I never had any of the issues you're having.

Some of the behavior you mention is also by design.

P.S.: what's a good editor for the Mac in your opinion, then? Sublime Text is good and native, but the file explorer shows folders first instead of folder content mixed like everywhere else on macOS--and that's _actually_ infuriating.

> I was on a Mac until a month ago and I never had any of the issues you're having.

You mean these things weren't happening, or they were but they didn't bug you? :P

> what's a good editor for the Mac in your opinion, then?

I use Coda 2. It does too much with its built-in terminal and MySQL client and Git client and FTP client and manuals, but it's mostly possible to just use it as a code editor and ignore the rest. (The one thing that it doesn't have built in that I wish it did is a GDB debugger.) It was pretty crashy right after High Sierra was released, but the developers eventually ironed those out.

Jesus, Coda!?

So you're using an outdated editor because you don't like VS Code's scrollbars (which can be themed, btw)?

It's a dead product.

Dead? What's your source for this claim?

https://library.panic.com/releasenotes/coda2/

It's maintained.

It hasn't changed in 5 years.

Fair enough. I don't need much else from a code editor that already started out pretty great.

I mean, by your standard, how much has vi changed over the last 35 years or so? Is vi dead?

Vi is feature-complete, Coda is obsolete.

Totally different things.

> I was on a Mac until a month ago and I never had any of the issues you're having.

For what it is worth, I'm on one now and am experiencing the same issues.

For the record, I upvoted you because I find that a useful warning. I am intrigued by this app, but Electron tempers my initial impression slightly. Putting it on the back-burner for now.

Why, though.

Electron apps tend to be rather resource heavy, and the UI sometimes has that uncanny valley feeling for they're not using any native controls.

I'll tolerate a good electron app, but I'll always prefer native.

People may be taking your comment as general knee-jerk electron hate but it really is something to consider.

If you're sending requests that can return very long json responses, Insomnia can lock up and force you to restart it.

Paw is a pretty good native alternative but it's macOS only, doesn't have a free tier beyond a short trial period, and has some UI quirks that made me ultimately go back to Insomnia despite the electron borne downsides.

If Insomnia could offload the request response parsing/formatting to a WebAssembly module it would be perfect.

I'm seeing that a fair number of posts in this comment thread say "I've had Insomnia and/or Postman freeze/lock up/crash with large responses."

I can't recall ever having a problem with curl and a large response.

Yes, these others are probably doing something like parsing the response and making it pretty and that's where the problem is. But just sayin'. (Also, most of the time, curl's memory usage can be measured in kilobytes. Again, just sayin'.)

Isn't postman electron too?

For those that prefer a native interface and use macOS there's always Paw: https://paw.cloud/

(I'm not affiliated with them, just like the product)

That's the information I was looking for. Thanks you've saved me a download.

What exactly is the 'fair warning' here? You're just deliberately starting a shit-thread and then goading people on top.

The warning is that the app will be unnaturally resource-intensive and have an odd UI compared to a "native" app.

I won't say I didn't intend to stir the shit a little with this comment and figured I'd rightly it would be downvoted or flagged into oblivion, but now it's my most upvoted comment in the last week or so. So people seem to appreciate it a lot more than anticipated. Maybe every Electron app that shows up on HN needs an "Electron warning!" subthread.

So what? Did it in any way foster interesting discussion? No, just the opposite. It's bad and you should feel bad.

> Did it in any way foster interesting discussion?

Six subthreads and seventeen total subcomments so far, so apparently so. Exclusive of this particular subthread, of course.

Neither upvotes, subthread counts, etc, are a measure of interestingness or quality. You started it as a shitrhead and it remained so.

I appreciate the warning, fwiw. I tend to dislike Electron apps, and avoid them if I can help it.

I don't mean to "shit on" Electron, it has it's uses - I just avoid it when possible.

I'm glad he gave me the heads up.

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