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Comment by mdaniel | Hacker News Reader

The previous discussion covers a lot of the experiences with this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29553767

Oof. That’s some toxic conversation.

What's toxic about it? Negative, sure, but it's not toxic to make a substantiated negative comment.

"Toxic" seems to have become a word you say when you don't like something, but you want to represent that it's inherently bad, rather than merely in your estimation.

Feel free to read my other comment, but by toxic I mean criticizing without any evidence whatsoever other than some preconceived notions about disk usage.

There’s a bit of ideological passion towards efficient computing and maybe that resulted in some hurty egos but I thought it was substantive.

This whole notion of people suggesting the size of a binary or its memory footprint inherently makes it unappealing or inefficient is just plain wrong. But what's disgusting is lambasting an app without _any_ evidence whatsoever other than some completely useless and arbitrary metric. I see that conversation as wholly unfounded and just plain repulsive.

If you want to criticize someone's hard work, at least bring some supporting evidence.

This whole "my terminal app uses 250 kilobytes of disk space" means absolutely nothing and is just plain rude. By that logic, gedit is a full fledged development environment.

I feel bad for people whose projects get shredded on HN, especially from a place of prejudice, like reflexive Electron hate.

But when I actually tried a bunch of Electron-based terminal emulators on Mac a few years ago... they all felt awful. They were slow in ways I did not realize terminal emulators even could be, and they often had extension ecosystems that were similarly slow and also buggy as hell.

Maybe things have improved a lot, or maybe Tabby is an exception. (I'd love to hear from longtime users of Tabby here.)

Electron is a decent fit for some products - I dont think a terminal emulator is one of them however.

> They were slow in ways I did not realize terminal emulators even could be

When I type in a normal terminal emulator (xterm, alacritty, anything!) it feels "fast." There is no perceptible lag whatsoever between pressing a key and the character showing up on the screen.

Then I switch to a tty, and realize there's somehow even less perceptible lag.

I'm afraid to try one that uses Electron.

Assuming a new project will have the same flaws as previous Electron projects may be prejudicial. It is not reflexive hatred.

I meant 'hate' in the more casual, vernacular sense of being a 'hater' or 'hating on' something. I was thinking of dismissive naysayers, rather than anything associated with the intense, moralistic sense that the word 'hatred' still carries.

But totally, people who are skeptical about the use of Electron (perhaps only in some problem domains) are not necessarily being truly hateful towards anyone or anything.

I had a similar experience.

It doesn't help that Terminal.app is incredibly performant and stable. Even when I found a cross-platform terminal with a nice feature set, watching it jank around while some build spams 50k lines of output would quickly burst that bubble.

> watching it jank around while some build spams 50k lines of output

Add tmux to the equation and have some output like that simultaneously occuring in multiple visible windows within a single pane, and Terminal.app will also struggle, in my experience. To get a smooth experience on Mac, I had to use iTerm2 and enable the then-experimental GPU acceleration in the alpha version.

I like to have my 'window management' for terminal stuff happen inside the terminal, so that my keybindings can live in my dotfiles and apply portably across operating systems. It's a great setup for me in terms of usability and efficiency, but it's also one that relies on great terminal performance. I was surprised to discover how much I'd taken terminal performance for granted!

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