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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

> And why Electron? Why not QT, or Java swing, or some other language with GTK?

In this specific case, the app was targeted for MacOS and OS X earlier. Java really isn't a good solve on that platform. Which also makes it not a good solve for anything on the Mac platform.

I have been wanting to build a UI tool for non-techies to be a front end to a collection of shell scripts that I have been using for day-to-day tasks. I have written the scripts to be a friendly as I can make them with drag-n-drop folders as inputs rather than requiring arguments to be provided. This looks like a good example for me to use as research.

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Electron apps are also horrible on the Mac (and probably everywhere else too). Buggy, bloated resource hogs with nonstandard and limited UI and incredibly high input latency for simple actions.

As a Mac user, when I hear “Electron app” I think “company that was too lazy/cheap to make a real Mac app.”

Also, if Electron apps are just a packaged up webpage, could they even do things like run shell scripts locally? I'm also wanting to allow the user to browse for a file and have the full path intact instead of just the name of the file a browser would return.

Not only that, but they have pervasive cross-site scripting vulnerabilities that are now exposing the user to remote code execution!

Also, they tend to have out of date dependencies, and are vulnerable to traditional code execution exploits that were fixed in upstream chrome long prior.

Hmm, I don't know about this. VS Code is an Electron app and I'm not sure if it would benefit that much from being a "real" Mac app. I much prefer that is it consistent across platforms. I do prefer Terminal.app to Hyper though.

I wouldn't mind if Slack had a native app but I'm not too bothered by it.

The VS code team has spent an inordinate amount of time optimizing their Electron usage to achieve some semblance of performance. VS Code is nice but it is still slower than Sublime, let alone Notepad++, Textmate, or Pluma/GTKedit

I can vouch that they're terrible on Linux, too.

It's a lazy, corner cutting way to build a cross platform app, and it shows.

If you want to build a simple UI on top of a script for Mac, I recommend Platypus: https://sveinbjorn.org/platypus

The app has been around for years, is open source, and works really well.

And by the same author as Sloth!

Thanks! This sounds like it might be exactly what I'm looking for, just need to find time to dig into it.

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