Atom was archived today

I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft, but they hired Erich Gamma and that was a brilliant move. He is an engineer I have tremendous respect for, with obvious vision. He was key in VisualAge for Java, which was a Java IDE, written in Smalltalk, which supported refactoring down to the smallest level (including file operations). He was obviously a key designer for VSCode. From its earliest days, I could see how they were sketching in facilities for advanced features in an open way, and it has maintained its development well.

> I have nothing intrinsic against electron, and I'll take everything back if I see these "natural fits" actually fit.

As a baseline, Electron performance _should_ be no worse than a regular SPA-style web UI running in the browser. Unless you find _everything_ on the web "irritatingly slow" it's surely _possible_ to create an Electron app with acceptable performance.

From my perspective anyway, I've both used and contributed to multiple Electron-based apps with performance that was not only "adequate" but not noticeably different from a typical native app. Basic Electron apps (done correctly) will look and feel more or less like a web app but perform more or less like a web app too.

FWIW there is a lightly-curated list of electron apps at https://www.electronjs.org/apps

I'm not sure offhand which of those is a good example of UI/UX and performance, but if you poke around with some of the medium-scope stuff (not too basic, not too ambitious) I'll bet you can find some examples.

UPDATE: I spot checked a few of those Electron apps for the fun of it. Here are a few examples you may find compelling:

* Deer - https://github.com/abahmed/Deer/releases/tag/v1.0.0 - A simple styled-text note-taking app that was last updated ~4 years ago. I don't _love_ all the UX choices personally but the performance seemed reasonable in my short test, especially considering the version of Electron they are using is 16 major releases out of date. There are probably more robust note-taking examples in that list (e.g. Inkdrop, Notable, Notion), this just happens to be the one I grabbed.

* Pencil - https://pencil.evolus.vn/ - A much more complex app for drawing fairly sophisticated Visio-like diagrams and UI mock-ups. Performance wise it seems about as responsive as a typical native app on my nearly 3 year old MacBook. But it may have large-ish baseline memory footprint so YMMV.

* I notice that some well known apps (or at least brands) are listed, like Trello, Asana, Notion, GitHub Desktop, Basecamp, WordPress, Twitch, Skype, Signal, Quickbooks, Light Table, Figma, WhatsApp, etc. For several of those I for one was not aware that they were Electron-based, and I'm guessing at least some (but probably not all) of those work pretty well. I think I've used both GitHub Desktop and Notion without anything to complain about but I'm not surprised that they are Electron apps. I've definitely used that Skype client and never noticed that it was an Electron app. I've never used it, but I'd bet Trello works well too.

IMO I think this demonstrates my original point in this thread: When an Electron app is well-engineered you don't even notice that it's Electron. It's survivor bias. People think Electron apps are bad because it's the bad apps that are noticeably Electron-based.

To be clear, I’m not talking about the menus in some special Emacs port like aquamacs, I mean the regular Emacs, with its menu bar, seen here: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/

Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/).

Having worked with a handful of terminal CLI purists I'm convinced most of the people who bang the drum hard for vi and emacs aren't nearly as productive as they think they are, and instead evangelize it largely for some mixture of these reasons:

1) They have a strong preference for keyboard only operation

2) It serves as a cultural cachet, or shibboleth, to signal how elite and pure a developer they are

3) they wish to continue working in the same environment they have been for years or decades, and learning new key binds, trying to find equivalent features and testing new features isn't worth some potential benefit

Everything else, like differences in RAM consumed, total install size, etc seem like post-hoc metric seeking for folks who have already decided what they like.