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Comment by mosselman | Hacker News Reader

It is totally me, seeing as how many electron projects there are, but I have never been able to make anything with it. Not even a POC, I have found it very complex.

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I have a hobby project in Electron but agree, the forced separation of "main" and "renderer" processes with multiple methods of influencing each other (ipcMain/ipcRenderer, remote, webContents.executeJavascript/send), and the further splitting of the renderer process into multiple similarly-named substructures (webFrame, webview, BrowserWindow, webContents) is a lot to get one's head around right off the bat and make stick, especially if you're the sort who wants to survey and disambiguate all the facilities of the platform beneath you before starting to code, rather than just trusting tutorials and tweaking code snippets towards some degree of satisfaction if and when they 'just work'.

On the Rich Hickey "simple vs easy" scale, Electron is very much leaning to the "easy" side.

If you have a working website it takes like 5 lines of code and random electron guide to actually do a POC. If you want to have a standalone APP, you need to have locally working SPA app. That requires rather deeper familiarity with current JS build stack.

Here's a very simple and terrible example. Nothing happens except the time is updated every second in the render process. This runs at 90.3 MB RAM usage on my machine and builds to 165.7 MB.

It's about as bare of a reference as you might find. Have at it. (Also there's no Readme, just consult the package file. I only threw this together when I was finding my way around it this spring)

https://github.com/Robert-Fairley/electron-typescript-starte...

If you happen to know Angular, it takes 1 minute to have something working: https://github.com/maximegris/angular-electron

The thing I built has enough code you can learn from to get you farther: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

Also check out nw.js which is like Electron, but you start in browser context instead of node.js context. Also consider running a node.js server and launching existing chrome with chrome --app=http://localhost or iexplore -k http://localhost

Agreed. I think NW.js is great (https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js). Especially the binary blob feature which can be used to compile JavaScript to V8 bytecode, and obfuscate portions of your source for security purposes.

I've read a tutorial that creates a small desktop application using nw.js and vue, and the package size was 233 mb. This made me decide to use Electron after all.

here it is: https://dev.to/n_tepluhina/building-a-desktop-app-with-vue-n...

That's my impression too. It seems like a lot of the "native development is hard, so I use Electron" have never once used native C# with Visual Studio.

When all you have is Javascript, everything looks like a nail

Or they might not have the bandwidth to deal with n different builds. I've written UIs in native motif, x, mfc, Android, and iOS, but with modern HTML & CSS (especially in the last couple years with flexbox, grid, canvas, svg support) and TypeScript it seems like there's new goodness daily.

That said, I'd love a divorce from Electron if something else would give me a system tray, node runtime, and seamless upgrades, supported cross-platform.

Visual Studio. That's a deal breaker right there.

With Electron runtime you can just write a text file on any of the supported platforms and you have a working, running desktop app. No compilation needed.

No need to install SDKs, deal with builds, project files, etc.

I don't think it's very complex. Only look at the target users! :-)

Jokes aside, lack of basic code protection (aside of script minimization and/or obfuscation) it's that prevents me from using Electron/Atom/whatever. I know anyone could decompile a C# application easily, but I find the javascript case worst.

Do you know any commercial applications using any of these solutions? (I'm speaking of shareware / paid software, not "Whatsapp desktop" type)

GitKraken uses Electron and has both free and paid features.

Please, correct me if I'm wrong, as I don't know GitKraken enough.

It appears to be a free client for a paid service. Not the type of commercial software I was thinking of.

It's a desktop GUI for Git, along the same lines as Sourcetree. They've added stuff over time like various paid integrations and apparently a Kanban board, but it's always primarily been a Git GUI.

Mailspring is another one I can think of. It's a free email client that offers extra features for pay.

Visual Studio Code?

VSC isn't commercial, though it's probably narrowing the market for commercial IDEs.

PhotoStructure for Desktop runs on macOS, Windows 10, and Ubuntu Desktop, is packaged with Electron (I'm alpha testing 6.0.0 today), and will be commercially licensed when the closed beta ends.

I'm also preparing a PhotoStructure for Servers build that is electron-less, and uses either docker or snap (it's how I run it on my NAS). I'm looking for more beta testers for this headless build, if you're interested.

https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/ has more background and signup information.

Disclaimer: I'm the author.

Thank you. How do you cope with the code being visible inside the application drectory?

About PhotoSctructure: - Great application idea, sincerely. My photo library is a big mess and this sounds super handy. - May I recommend another icon? I find strange that PhotoStructure "for Desktop" has a cloud in it's icon :-) - Regarding being a tester, thank you, but my current file server is a very stripped down debian box right now (Fujitsu Futro S900).

:-)

The cloud bit is because it's going to support dweb/multi-user sharing (added in a version coming Any Day Now).

I'm testing it on an rpi 4, so if you've got ~> 2gb ram, it should run.

Awesome. Please, tell me how can I help at "luis at my-username-here dot com".

Thank you!

I built Video Hub App - open source but also for sale for $3.50 (with over 700 purchases in the last 1.5years)

https://videohubapp.com/

https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App -- built with Angular

Thank you. My main concern is about protecting closed source software.

Great app, by the way.

there are few popular ones Slack, VSCode, Atom editor, etc...

The OP mentioned closed source electron products where the source code can be safely protected

Given the React Native for Windows talk at BUILD 2019, and their comparisation how it beats Electron, how Office and other teams are now adopting it, I still hope VSCode will eventually join the party.

They even did a nice graphic.

With UWP C++ being the reference point of 100%, UWP C# gets also 100% (thanks .NET Native), React Native 180% and Electron goes sky high above 700%!

https://youtu.be/TZnajQqqKV8?t=2919

This is how much everyone doing Electron apps is contributing to global warming, including VSCode team.

I'm surprised microsoft isn't pushing xamarin instead of React Native for cross platform.

They address that during BUILD.

Xamarin for .NET devs, React Native for C++ devs (think Qt/QML).

Seems like React Native is for Android, iOS and UWP (Windows), so no Mac or Linux, right?

Doesn't seem like a direct competitor with Electron then. Right?

There is ongoing support for React Native for Mac.

http://www.reactnative.com/build-os-x-desktop-apps-using-rea...

You got me there on GNU/Linux support, which doesn't mean it will not come later. They just need to decide which flavour of Linux desktop one is supposed to support in React Native.

You don't need to decide that much, since Qt works fine on GNOME and GTK works fine on KDE.

Not sure for Linux, but Mac has a fork of react native, and things are a bit slower now until we see what happens with UXKit.

Kind of hoping UXKit sticks a fork in RN, myself. (just my opinion)

React Native will work on Mac through project Catalyst, Apple's way of supporting code written against iOS's UIKit to run natively on Macs.

Some initial work was already done to make React Native compile for this target: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/pull/25427

Complex compared to what exactly?

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