Live data from Hacker News

Notepad++ v8 release

notepad-plus-plus.org

161–167 of 167 posts

Re: Notepad++ v8 release

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spotify is a music streaming service. I don't understand this objection. Every time people say "software is slow today: compare Spotify to Winamp/Xmms", the objectiion is that Spotify isn't Xmms, it's a music streaming service. But so what? Why can't a music streaming service be fast to start up? It's already a thick client. My life isn't going to end if I can start playing music within milliseconds but the playlis…

The real question is why does a service require a specific program to use it.

As far as I remember you can use Spotify in browser, so it’s not true.

I don’t really understand the rant about Spotify. In my experience it’s one of the “good” modern apps. One of the amazing features that it has is the remote playback control - I can listen to the music from my PS4 and control it from any of my devices that have Spotify installed.

What they could do better is the playlist organizer, the existing one is too simple.

I mostly agree that the overall quality of the modern software is subpar, comparing to the gems from the past (vim, emacs, winamp, vlc, etc), but Spotify is more or less fine.

Re: Notepad++ v8 release

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, I think the UI is fit for purpose, doesn't need a flatso look and feel or massive space used for static text. Thanks for building an awesome tool that runs for weeks at a time on my desktop.

Can't agree more. Notepad++ is a great tool, that does what it's supposed to do. Maximal milk for minimal moo. I wish there were more tools like this. winscp, 7-zip, all having the same win32 look, and I like them. I never got people complaining about outdated look. When did computers become fashion items, with a new color every year? Last season we went for round corners, but these are clearly out. Today, flat is th…

> I never got people complaining about outdated look. When did computers become fashion items, with a new color every year? Last season we went for round corners, but these are clearly out. Today, flat is the new round. Why?

Funny thing is that like fashion it has a repetitive cycle too. Flat with basic colors back to colorful and shaded, back to flat, ... . Probably to look innovative by setting a new trend.

Re: Notepad++ v8 release

#163
post #133
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron is Flash for the Desktop. https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/ While I don't appreciate most of Apples business strategies, I have to admit that Steve Jobs was right about banning Flash. It was eating the battery runtime of MacBooks. And Steve Jobs would have banned[1] Electron probably already years ago, because it is consuming so much memory. But especially so many big tech companies…

It's really like Groundhog Day, for those who are to young, we had Java-Apps (terrible slow in the early days), then massive web-apps and now electron, in the mean time every professional application stayed at TUI's (banks/insurance/booking-systems), it's the same with os-installers...do i really need a flutter based installer? No it's bullshit, just give me a well structured text installer, no gui needed for that jo…

TUIs are wonderful. They are easy to grasp, fast and restrict requirements, everyone involved must think about the workflow and efficient usage. Input is focused entirely on the keyboard. Linux overs some modern TUIs e.g. installer, apt-stuff or the kernel config aside from that:

https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ // classic

https://github.com/willmcgugan/rich // blingbling

https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses // hacker

For the old stuff I recommend looking close at airports, savings-banks or part-dealers. When it is influenced by mainframes you will notice likely forwards/backwards is done by F7/F8. How do you depict an plane with seats in TUI? I assume an array, 80 rows and 10 columns ;)

I'm impressed how flawless elderly co-workers work with TUIs. They read the screen, think and type and the work is done. I guess the straight workflow, clean user-interface and similarities to paper forms improve usability. I guess modal dialogs, popup warnings, status icons, right click and the modern long press are not an improvement in usability. And the many tiny icons and bars in modern text processors aren't a help either.

I think we can learn a lot more from old programmers.

Re: Notepad++ v8 release

#164
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really like Groundhog Day, for those who are to young, we had Java-Apps (terrible slow in the early days), then massive web-apps and now electron, in the mean time every professional application stayed at TUI's (banks/insurance/booking-systems), it's the same with os-installers...do i really need a flutter based installer? No it's bullshit, just give me a well structured text installer, no gui needed for that jo…

TUIs are wonderful. They are easy to grasp, fast and restrict requirements, everyone involved must think about the workflow and efficient usage. Input is focused entirely on the keyboard. Linux overs some modern TUIs e.g. installer, apt-stuff or the kernel config aside from that: https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ // classic https://github.com/willmcgugan/rich // blingbling https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurse…

>I assume an array, 80 rows and 10 columns

No you just need front, middle, back, window, handicap? and how many seats next to each other for your travel buddy's. That's the cool thing, no need to use your mouse, no need to show more information than needed for the job.

Re: Notepad++ v8 release

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was one update a couple years ago that after the first time it ran, it opened a new document tab, and started typing a political message (I think it was about Snowden leaks/privacy). Watching a document open and someone seemingly remotely type in the window made me very very uncomfortable. I agree it is his right, and I even agreed with the message, but it completely discredits the tool and the developer. I hav…

> Watching a document open and someone seemingly remotely type in the window made me very very uncomfortable. I remember this and had the same uncomfortable reaction, but because I was uncomfortable I thought it was a great way to alert people to the type of spying Snowden made public. What you bring up is an old question for companies, should you sell typewriters to Hitler? Or should you be political? Most American…

Was it effective if you think it was something related to Snowden? The phrase that it typed out was "Je suis Charlie". That was about a mass shooting at the HQ of a satire publication.

Re: Notepad++ v8 release

#166
post #157
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your 8 year old ThinkPad is less powerful than a $300 smartphone What does "more powerful" even mean? If you mean "better single-threaded CPU performance", I absolutely don't believe you. If you mean "better multi-threaded CPU performance", I might believe you, but would need evidence. Moreover, that's irrelevant . I, and everyone else who talks about "bloated Electron apps" (including in this thread) is almost exc…

A Samsung A51 is a budget phone: https://browser.geekbench.com/android_devices/samsung-galaxy... Similar performance to an average Haswell Laptop CPU. https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-4600u Also it has the Intel 4000 series. This GPU lagged in rendering the windows desktop on 1080. Let alone with a dual monitor setup. It's not irrelevant. My point is that your ancient CPU with a horrible GPU is…

Alright, I'll take your benchmarks. Thank you.

However, it doesn't matter.

> It's not irrelevant. My point is that your ancient CPU with a horrible GPU is less powerful than a mid range smart phone.

I literally pointed out exactly why it's irrelevant, and you completely ignored me. I'll point it out again:

> I, and everyone else who talks about "bloated Electron apps" (including in this thread) is almost exclusively referring to desktop applications.

Comparing phones to laptops is an apples-to-oranges comparison. It doesn't matter if a low-end phone might be able to run an Electron app well, because we're not talking about low-end phones - the discussion in this thread, as well as almost every other thread that refers to "bloated Electron applications", is talking exclusively about desktops.

If your "point is that your ancient CPU with a horrible GPU is less powerful than a mid range smart phone", then your point is also irrelevant for the purposes of people talking about bloated Electron apps, because almost none of them are discussing phones.

> There needs to come a point where you accept that your hardware is crap not the software.

Yes, and 7-year-old hardware is not that point for these programs - maybe for ML training, but not chat apps. That point only occurs when hardware is slow enough that the algorithms needed to run the core functionality cannot run quickly on it. Software that does not make efficient use of its hardware is crap. Electron does not make efficient use of its hardware.

Electron is either crap, or makes it so easy to write crap that it might as well be. There's a reason that you see people so often complaining about it, and that's because it's so inefficient that it causes a noticeably poor user experience, even for developers running on mid-range devices (which makes it far worse on low-end devices).

As evidence, Ripcord[1] offers a substantial subset of the features of Discord and Slack[2] with significantly better performance. The fact that it's made by a single person and yet manages to significantly out-perform large teams of (ostensibly) competent engineers while still implementing the core functionality provides strong evidence that it is the framework's fault, because it's clearly not because those features are somehow intrinsically computationally expensive to implement.

> I'd say the majority of shitty applications I've used is coded in Java.

Yes, and I think that Java is a terrible platform, too, speaking from experience with Minecraft, GNU Electric, Netbeans, and Eclipse. That doesn't make Electron any less bad.

> Is it fair to say that all apps coded with Java is shit?

Nobody said that they (or Electron apps) are. All of the complaints that I've seen, including mine, is that Electron generally has terrible performance, strongly encourages bad performance, that all major applications built in it are slow, and while it might be possible to build fast tools in it, we haven't seen them.

> But also where are you getting your 15% from?

...literally the CPU usage of Discord while it's running.

[1] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ [2] https://dev.cancel.fm/service_features

Re: Notepad++ v8 release

#167
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spotify is a music streaming service. That being said, I stream Spotify music through foobar using an external plugin, mainly because it is so light. Yeah, it isn't perfect, but if there was a demand for a light app, it is perfectly possible.

Can it access Spotify playlists, or just local ones? I've been looking for alternative Spotify desktop clients but I've never found anything I like.

You can put in a Spotify playlist link, and pull in all the songs from that into a local playlist, but it can't directly play a remote playlist (i.e. updating when new songs are added).
Post reply on HN