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Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

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191–200 of 268 posts

Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

#191
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. What did you switch to? I'm watching that space so i can recommend alternatives everywhere I work. Must be F/OSS. Top of the list currently are Rocket.chat and Matrix.

Try mattermost

Nah, definitely not Mattermost. It's open core, which is kind of dubious, and not better than Rocket.chat - we switched away from it to Rocket.chat at a previous job.

Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

#192
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are comparing apples with pears. Sublime can't be compared to VS Code because the former is basically an advanced editor while the latter is an IDE (like PhpStorm or Atom). And I highly doubt that many users switching from Sublime to VS Code. They use one or the other for a specific reason, like a blazing fast and distraction free editing experience in Sublime - something you do not have in VS Code or any other I…

The line between advanced text editor and lightweight IDE is basically non existent. Plenty of former sublime users are on VS code now.

So? Plenty of former VScode users are on Sublime, Vim or Emacs now.

I really don't get your point.

Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to go too far to find an example: Sublime Text and Sublime Merge. While this route is probably not for quick app deployment, but boy can it kick ass when properly done in C++ with custom GUI framework. I love Sublime Text and Sublime Merge. I love their philosophy towards software design. I love how they value user experience above everything else. There are very few pieces of software that give you so much p…

Yet so many still migrate to VSCode which is electron based. So maybe the difference you value isn’t valued enough to be worth it for most authors. I get the point you’re making, but you might be in the minority here.

Citation needed. How many exactly?

Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

#194
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> snappy enough to run > Electron is a new brainer Not everyone on earth is a dev/gamer/video-editor. For regular people, electron is a cancer that needs to be nipped in the bud. Remember, 91% of the desktop on earth is Windows (meaning regular USD 300 machines). And of them I'd wager less than 10% fit have machines where electron is snappy (1.2K Thinkpads). What the earth needs is a better cross platform native GUI…

>> What the earth needs is a better cross platform native GUI framework. NOT electron. I always like to use VSCode as an example. It's a tool a use on a daily basis, and I like almost everything about it. It's also a poster-child for a good Electron application, maybe one of the best around. Add to that I completely understand why it was made using Electron, and why it might not have existed in this form (available,…

I find that VSCode outperforms Visual Studio in ‘snappiness’ where Traditional VS lags greatly occasionally on editor input... as far as random glitches go, VS is shite in that dept.

Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If users are held at gunpoint and have to choose between a fast app and a feature rich app, I would bet they will choose the latter.

Given what counts as "feature rich" these days (and it seems some developers are constantly removing things that users used to use), I doubt that. Software used to be both fast and "feature rich" (relatively speaking), designed so users could "grow" and learn increasingly more of it. Now almost everything seems to have idiotically dumbed-down "flat" UIs that look simpler yet still manage to consume more resources tha…

The new Skype is a bad example. It's a perfect example of a designed-by-a-committee-of-managers product that tries and fails to understand the moving part of alternatives such as Slack, Facebook Messenger etc.

Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> What the earth needs is a better cross platform native GUI framework. NOT electron. I always like to use VSCode as an example. It's a tool a use on a daily basis, and I like almost everything about it. It's also a poster-child for a good Electron application, maybe one of the best around. Add to that I completely understand why it was made using Electron, and why it might not have existed in this form (available,…

>But it's not.snappy.enough. I was following you until this line... In general I agree about Electron though probably not to the same degree as you. But for me VSCode runs amazingly well; I think the only thing that tops it is Sublime (and I vastly prefer VSCode's interface and features). Not saying that what you said isn't your experience, but you should know it's not everyone's experience.

VSCode is worlds faster than Atom. However, relative to any native editor (Sublime Text, Gedit, GVim, Notepad++, Notepad itself, ...), VSCode ranges from anywhere between "sluggish" to "... is it frozen?". Now, I agree that how big the difference is, and how big a problem that becomes is subjective, but the presence of the difference itself is not.

A good example being opening a new window. This is something I do semi-often to edit something out-of-context that shouldn't taint my current workspace. Under anything from Notepad to Gedit or Sublime Text, this task has no perceivable latency. Under VSCode, however, it is so uncomfortably slow that I actively try to avoid it, and instead use Gedit for these editing tasks. This is a significant downgrade in workflow compared to Sublime Text.

So, why do I use it? Well, features. However, what must be made very clear is that none of the features I use in VSCode exist as a result of Electron. Terminal panes and the better Go/Rust integration has nothing to do with Electron, and are within areas of difficulty that I could have added it myself over a weekend had Sublime Text been open source. But it's not, so I can't.

Electron is cancer.

Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

#197

I find it amusing that the opening paragraph describes it as a "framework for building cross-platform desktop apps" and then shortly below that in the "Supported Platforms" section it lists one Mac OS and one very specific version of Windows. No Linux at all. Even native Windows apps are more cross-platform than that! (I have written a few which will work on any version of Windows starting at Win95...)

People are always complaining about Electron for shipping along with every single application, but actually, modern Linux desktop is not that far away from this just by itself. On a relatively standard desktop installation I currently have

- webkit-gtk2 - webkit-gtk3 - qtwebkit - qtwebengine

Additionally I have two Geckos for Firefox and Thunderbird. All of them use skia, which then also gets compiled 6 times in total.

Using Gentoo, I'm a bit sensitive to this sort of thing ;)

Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> What the earth needs is a better cross platform native GUI framework. NOT electron. I always like to use VSCode as an example. It's a tool a use on a daily basis, and I like almost everything about it. It's also a poster-child for a good Electron application, maybe one of the best around. Add to that I completely understand why it was made using Electron, and why it might not have existed in this form (available,…

>But it's not.snappy.enough. I was following you until this line... In general I agree about Electron though probably not to the same degree as you. But for me VSCode runs amazingly well; I think the only thing that tops it is Sublime (and I vastly prefer VSCode's interface and features). Not saying that what you said isn't your experience, but you should know it's not everyone's experience.

Going from Sublime to VSCode felt intolerably slow. I think Sublime is much better but the trillion dollar company is too much to fight against I guess, the community for VSCode is too big now.

Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview

#200
post #137

I think it's interesting how debates about Electron inevitably end up with the arguments 'the developer wants X' vs 'the user wants Y'. However, there's one aspect a lot of people seem to overlook in their arguments: pragmatism. The ideal application: - uses almost no memory - uses almost no disk space - is extremely fast - costs (next to) nothing - and has all the features in the world - presented in a manner that a…

> snappy enough to run > Electron is a new brainer Not everyone on earth is a dev/gamer/video-editor. For regular people, electron is a cancer that needs to be nipped in the bud. Remember, 91% of the desktop on earth is Windows (meaning regular USD 300 machines). And of them I'd wager less than 10% fit have machines where electron is snappy (1.2K Thinkpads). What the earth needs is a better cross platform native GUI…

Qt isn't good enough for you? These days it's even scriptable with JavaScript.
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