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Comment by Syonyk | Hacker News Reader

> I can't quite put my finger on what I like about it so much.

I can.

Doesn't require a 1.5GB build directory to make a 500MB binary that uses 3GB of RAM to display a chat client/music player/etc.

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The node-based CLI tools kind of do though.

It boggles my mind people use Node for this.

'When all you have is a hammer'

I don't have a hammer, but I know how to import it!

Not sure what to do with it, I'll just import "structural connectors."

Hm. Oh, look, a "match tool to connector" library! Wait, it builds a map the wrong way. I'll just import a "reverse map" tool.

Hm. Well, whatever, my build directory is a few hundred GB and somehow includes all of McMaster's web inventory, but that's fine, SSDs are cheap!

And now I know that I need a "nail" for the hammer!

Sorry, can you tell I don't like modern web dev techniques and styles?

I mean, in a Node project, if I need some internal CLI tool, I'll just write a Node script. But for distributable apps, doesn't make much sense to me either.

Oh, do I have a terminal emulator to sell you:

https://hyper.is/

> Hyper is an Electron-based terminal

I mean Hyper is really just an IDE that's REPL focused and so it makes as much sense to be in Electron as VSCode.

It makes ALOT of sense that vscode is written in electron. Why would you think otherwise?

I don't read the parent comment as saying that vscode shouldn't be written in electron. I read it as the opposite, that they are defending the terminal emulator using electron.

Also, out of interest, what reasons would you give for vscode being written with electron?

I read it as sarcasm, cause writing a terminal emulator in electron is really a stretch, could be wrong ofc.

At first I was a bit irritated that vscode is build on electron. Then I found code-server, essentially vscode in the browser and fell in love with it. I can run a fully fledged IDE on a PI without using too much ram or CPU power because the client does a lot of the ui heavy lifting. Then also the other way around, I use code-server on my powerful tower pc and can connect to it via vpn to run heavy coding tasks directly on the server while not miss8ng a single IDE feature. I use the metals plug-in to code Scala backend services and it works incredibly well. Much better then using remote desktop applications (nomachine, vnc, xrdp etc.) on the go. It's even better then ssh when the connection is bad, like mosh but for ui.

Also, every app uses the same font and colors, there is no animation, its very responsive.

The submitted library features a physics-based animation system, so that may change

no thanks

That's definitely not true. While fonts may be the same, colours are definitely not. Many terminals support a very large array of colours. Lots of tools have animations for progress bar, and a shell us no guarantee of being responsive. Anything that displays git statuses in the prompt will take multiple seconds to be ready on a large project, and many will just silently pause while they chug away at whatever they're doing.

In terms of responsiveness, there are plenty of terminal based apps that respond poorly to window resizing (the flickerkng is incredibly frustrating to me), or just don't handle aspect ratio changes at all and clip the ends of lines. Some tui applications don't clear their screen buffer properly on quit so completely break scrolling back the terminal. Many terminals really suck for performance and can really really chug if you accidentally dump a large JSON file to the terminal, for example. That's not responsive at all.

Also, natural language is a better command interface than iconic point and click for intermediate to advanced users. The mouse studies that came out of Apple back in the day were based on testing against the mass market so their findings only apply to mom, pop, buddy and sis.

Have there been studies done on "advanced users"? I'm an advanced user and I think mouse based interfaces are great when mixed sensibly with keyboard shortcuts and command search (like VSCode's Ctrl-Shift-P).

I'm not going to ever use the Edit->Copy menu but I'm also not going to learn the shortcut to click the Ublock origin button in Chrome, which I do maybe once a month.

Do you have any evidence for your assertion? It sounds like snobbery.

lol. Too true..

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