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Hyper 2, Electron based terminal

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Re: Hyper 2, Electron based terminal

#101

Post by flukus »

physicsguy wrote: post #81
flukus wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average end-user has less than 4GB of RAM and would struggle to run electron apps at all. They would get frustrated with the computer being slow but would not know who to blame. Aside from that, electron apps do not look, act or feel native.

Does the average developer though? I wouldn't want to work on a developer machine without at least 8gb.

It really depends, some work might necessitate 8GB+ but most really shouldn't and only do because the tools they use were built by developers with that much RAM.

At work I need my 16GB but that's because Visual Studio and the app I'm working on the most are memory pigs. Visual Studio 2017 doesn't really have any compelling features over 2005, but 2005 ran quite comfortably in 2GB, so with this piece of software alone I need a lot more memory for no gain.

At home in the other hand I have a fairly low end (and now 3 year old) dell laptop with 8GB of RAM, but with my current c project and DE (i3, riced way more than necessary) I'm using less than 2GB (with vim+unix as the IDE), so plenty to burn when required. This is a more productive environment too, I have a fully incremental build that will compile, run unit tests and run memory tests in the blink of an eye every time I save a file, so I'm getting much more feedback much quicker than I do with Visual Studio.

Devs on lower resource machines will also be dogfooding much better. If their apps are slow and bloated then they'll feel the pain their users will and be much more likely to address them. Windows 10 might have a start menu that didn't take several seconds to open if the developers weren't on top of the line surface pro's.

Re: Hyper 2, Electron based terminal

#103

Post by rhodysurf »

drinchev wrote: post #50
sakuronto wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about good ol' QT?

Last time I checked the bindings of QT[1] for NodeJS were not updated since 6 years. I think they are still unmaintained and also are lacking the community around it. I think GitHub embracing Chrome-wrapped-apps was a significant move, since no other company did something similar for desktop javascript applications. Maybe we will need to wait a bit more, until some of the big tech companies realises that having bette…

Then learn a new language? It shouldn’t be that hard to transition between languages for UI stacks

Re: Hyper 2, Electron based terminal

#105

Post by sametmax »

sime2009 wrote: post #92
sametmax wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python and js apps have the same order of magnitude of speed. But pyqt apps are way faster than electron

No they don't. JS running on a modern engine like V8 are easily 10x faster than CPython which PyQt uses. If you think Python and JS are about the same speed then it is because of Qt itself, but certainly not because of CPython.

I have coded with both, and practically, yes, they are. The only place where JS would beat Python would be a big loop with number crunching, which you would do with numpy anyway. Or pypy, which is 50 times faster than V8.

A desktop app would not see any difference. A sysadmin script neihter. Data analystics is made using numpy/scipy/pandas. Web sites bottleneck are incredibly rarely the server side scripting language, and when it is, you go rust/go.

But for our current debate, electron VS PyQT, well yes, the C++ does the heavy lifting and you get to use Python only for the stuff it is good at. Win-win.

The problem with using PyQT is making an exe or making fancy graphics is harder than in electron.

Everything else, and I do mean everything else, is easier and more performant with PyQT.

Re: Hyper 2, Electron based terminal

#106

Post by btrask »

majewsky wrote: post #37
agumonkey wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hey, how else can I change the transparency of my shell with css ?

You can't. You can only change the transparency of the terminal. This comment (though probably by mistake) manages to perfectly illustrate the "reinventing things that we don't even understand" mindset that's going on in most of tech. (Also, there exist terminals written in C++ with Qt, and QtWidgets has had CSS support for custom styling for at least 10 years, probably much longer.)

This is a great "well actually" that also manages to be technically incorrect. If you change the styling in your terminal emulator, it changes the transparency of your shell (and other terminal programs).

Re: Hyper 2, Electron based terminal

#108

Post by SPBS »

jannes wrote: post #80
fbnlsr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using VSCode for years and it's been great, but I'm always looking for learning something new. I keep reading about Vim and last time I checked it seems SO complicated to use. I don't understand how it's so popular. Is it because it's blazing fast?

You can use vim keybindings in VSCode. It mostly works, except for more advanced stuff. Correct indentation when pasting is a pain in my opinion. And somehow I find the VSCode's multi-cursor feature so much more convenient than Vim's macros.

> And somehow I find the VSCode's multi-cursor feature so much more convenient than Vim's macros.

That’s not an unpopular opinion, I suspect it’s because multiple cursors provide an extremely tight visual feedback loop (feedback after every action) as compared to macros where you kind of just shove actions into a black box and pray it works correctly for the next location you test it on

Re: Hyper 2, Electron based terminal

#110

Post by mercer »

caspervonb wrote: post #15

Like I've said a million times, https://medium.com/p/electron-is-cancer-b066108e6c32 Why would you use a full web stack terminal emulator, over.. well a normal native and actually reasonably fast terminal emulator? The trend is catching on, so maybe one day we can't even reach for a native email client because it will be unmaintained in favour of the hackable html webstack email client. Congratulations on reaching v2…

I'm generally pretty pragmatic about using stuff that is convenient even if might not be too efficient, but I have to agree with most usage of Electron that I find. I'm using a MacBook that, while a few years old, still does almost everything well. It struggles when I have a few Electron-based apps open and that's just ridiculous. It also drastically impacts battery life.

It's reached a point where I use my iOS devices for Spotify and/or Slack just so my laptop can run whatever other crappy Electron app I need to use.

I find that VSCode is almost worth it, but that's perhaps one of the few exceptions (and I still go for Sublime Text most of the time).

Any app that needs to be persistent really has no business using Electron. It's a terrible waste.

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