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Comment by pxc | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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.

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!

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.

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