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An 'alt+space' launcher for Windows, built with Electron

github.com

11–20 of 65 posts

Re: An 'alt+space' launcher for Windows, built with Electron

#12
post #7

This is cute as a proof of concept, but it needs severe performance improvements if it's intended to replace Launchy. Launchy sits there with 30mb ram used and no cpu used when not in use. This launcher sits there with 170mb ram used, and 1% of a core in constant use.

Why do more people not get annoyed with the inefficiency of JS... its just burning CPU cycles and RAM!

Even 30MB is ridiculous for this type of App... back in the DOS days there were similar TSRs using a few KB of RAM.

Re: An 'alt+space' launcher for Windows, built with Electron

#15
Don't want to be the naysayer here, but this project is yet another 'I made smth already exisiting but with node.js and the original is still largely better'.

I think there are more interesting open source projects that should hit the HN frontpage. So let's start with this one, that computes Wikipedia Pagerank on a single node in less than 30 minutes : https://www.nayuki.io/page/computing-wikipedias-internal-pag...

Re: An 'alt+space' launcher for Windows, built with Electron

#17
post #7

This is cute as a proof of concept, but it needs severe performance improvements if it's intended to replace Launchy. Launchy sits there with 30mb ram used and no cpu used when not in use. This launcher sits there with 170mb ram used, and 1% of a core in constant use.

Why do more people not get annoyed with the inefficiency of JS... its just burning CPU cycles and RAM! Even 30MB is ridiculous for this type of App... back in the DOS days there were similar TSRs using a few KB of RAM.

Those TSRs also had little to no UI, and keep an index for fast searches. Images are probably also a part of it since seemingly no application these days can look like a native application anymore :|

Re: An 'alt+space' launcher for Windows, built with Electron

#18
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They definitely should. I have a dedicated button for it, so will continue to use that, but many of my colleagues (at a S-ME IT service provider) didn't know this menu existed. Trust the Indian guy to know, though

You have a dedicated Alt+Space (System Menu) button? Never saw that before, would be curious what kind of keyboard this is. I'm always interested in different kinds of keyboards. Or is it a menu key that opens the right-click menu (not the same as the alt+space system menu), like this one: http://www.laptopmag.com/images/wp/purch-api/incontent/2012/...

It's called a context menu :)

Back in the day before those fancy keyboards (and today still) the other keyboard shortcut is Shift+F10.

Re: An 'alt+space' launcher for Windows, built with Electron

#19
post #15

Don't want to be the naysayer here, but this project is yet another 'I made smth already exisiting but with node.js and the original is still largely better'. I think there are more interesting open source projects that should hit the HN frontpage. So let's start with this one, that computes Wikipedia Pagerank on a single node in less than 30 minutes : https://www.nayuki.io/page/computing-wikipedias-internal-pag...

There's nothing stopping you from submitting, if it's truly interesting it will appear on the front page.

Don't try to hijack someone else's post.

Re: An 'alt+space' launcher for Windows, built with Electron

#20
post #2

How does this match up to Launchy?

Launchy doesn't require you to install npm first.

I don't think you're intended to build it from source - you can just get a binary: https://github.com/appetizermonster/Hain/releases
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