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baldfat

Friendly note there are good electron apps.

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Two, to be precise.

- Discord

- VS Code

If by "good" you mean "useful." Both are still non-native-UX piles of mess and would be far better and less resource-intensive if implemented as native apps.

And then you realize you need to port the same app from Windows to Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. Good luck.

I really don't see the problem with either of those. I spend 8+ hours a day in VSCode and it works flawlessly.

I just spent more than three hours with a friend on Discord playing The Division and it was smooth as it can be.

It's kind of become the norm to hate on Electron apps, but to be fair, I don't see the point.

While the bloat of having to basically install a full version of Chrome just to get a UI makes a little part of me die inside, I'll second the 8+ hours a day in VSCode.

I'm working on a python project right now and enjoying PyCharm quite a bit, but in a window right next to me is VS Code with my running log. I'm using it at home with a plug-in to write code in CUDA and C++, I use it at work for TypeScript and dotnet core C#, editing configuration files. Heck, on one of my Windows boxes, I have a PowerShell command "Edit-File" that opens up the target in VS Code, is set to the default commit comment editor for Git and aliases "nvim" because I can't get NeoVim to work on that box to save my life.

Sure, it doesn't launch anywhere near as quickly as vi/vim/nvim, but since I live out of the thing, it's always already pulled up and the time it takes to open a file when the editor is already up is plenty fast.

As far as being resource heavy -- I like to work on the couch at work and it's nowhere near a plug. I started doing light editing of C# and .NET apps in VS Code to avoid having Visual Studio halve my battery life. I get a solid 4 hours of editing/testing which isn't all that much less than I get just leaving Windows running with nothing open. It wasn't always like that, sure -- I recall either Atom or VS Code having a bug where the cursor blinking caused the CPU to stay steady at 15% (though, ConEmu -- a must-have console app for Windows[0] hangs at around 5-10% CPU with nothing executing, too), but I haven't had any battery/memory/CPU issues running Code for the last year or so.

[0] If you use cmder, that's Conemu

R Studio

I laughed at this -- I believe Keybase is also electron and that's on my must-install list every time.

Props to VS Code - that, along with the excellent Markdown Enhanced Preview and (less excellent, but usable) VSVim extension is my note-taking app ... on my HP Omen laptop loaded with openSUSE Tumbleweed. Of the 7 or so people that I work directly with at the company that employs me, all of them run Linux (with most using Manjaro) and VS Code is pulled up on one of the monitors on every one of them.

Who'd have thunk that a bunch of developers running Linux would be writing the vast majority of their code using a Microsoft product built natively for Linux named after another development tool who's name is usually proceeded by a profanity when spoken by a typical *nix geek.

Wait, Visual Studio Code is an electron app?! I always thought it was written in C++ which was why it was so smooth and fast unlike Atom.

They didn't say whether electron was good or bad. Just that this app is one.

I didn't say it in my above post, no, but I'll say it in this one: Electron is bad.

Specifically, it allows lazy dev teams to deploy lazy "apps."

You don't know how good you have it. Try using Inkscape on a Mac.

Before Electron, the quality of the average cross-platform app was generally atrocious. e.g. lack of support for retina displays, menu bars attached to the window, system fonts totally missing, non-system file pickers, ugly homegrown font rendering...

Electron is amazing and as much as people like to shit on it, it has raised the quality bar considerably.

I'm feeling strange defending Electron, because I have crapped all over it in the past, too. There are certainly too many simple little apps written in electron that come with a 65MB download to do things I don't care about, but I'll second this.

The problem you have with "Inkscape on a Mac" is all over the place. I cringe when I go to install an app and find out it's used some C++ GUI kit that was designed for X/linix. They all "sort of" work on Windows -- the file dialogs will be all wrong, they'll have forward instead of back-slashes sometimes, none of my pinned folders will be there, etc. The windows in the app will sort-of feel like native Windows apps but will function just screwy enough that you long to be running KDE or Gnome[0]. Even if they look good in all of those OSes, they rarely provide the same experience. Then there's the handful of Electron apps I use. Keybase looks and behaves exactly the same way in KDE and Windows, as does Visual Studio Code and draw.io (though I almost always just use this right from the site, itself). And I'm very happy with the UI of those apps. Then I decide I want to tweak the way a ligature looks in a font I rely on and make the mistake of launching FontForge on my Windows box and remember why cross-platform generally means "take the worst of every platform and use only those features". Non-electron cross-platform apps all-too-often look like Java-based GUI apps from the early 00's -- write once, suffer everywhere.

[0] I've had apps that launch in a single pane within KDE/Gnome, but in Windows launch as several separate windows and apps that launch as normal looking windows in KDE/Gnome but in Windows look like a "Window within a Window" with all of the native Windows chrome outlining the application's window chrome, akin to placing a camera in front of a television and watching that camera's feed to watch a show/movie.

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