Hyper 2, Electron based terminal • Hacker News Board

Re: Hyper 2, Electron based terminal

#51

Post by movedx » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 7:36 AM UTC

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…

Good read. Thanks.

And I agree: Electron is horrible to deal with as an end-user. I've been using Vim for some time and then decided to use VS Code. The integrations, plugins, and everything else were awesome, but man the 3-4GB of RAM was just crazy. Despite the fact my machine has 16GB of RAM, I'm dealing with quite a few VMs and Docker containers locally, so actually 16GB isn't a lot.

Re: Hyper 2, Electron based terminal

#52

Post by sime2009 » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 7:40 AM UTC

sakuronto wrote: post #41

drinchev wrote: post #38

Wow so much hate in this thread. First, the author is not doing this for his CV. Second, the benefits of using electron are enormous for any JS developer and there are a lot. Third, I also hate electron apps and wouldn’t use this app, but I’m not going to jump back to “why electron is bad” discussion, since I can’t suggest anything better in 2018.

What about good ol' QT?

The problem is that your language choice is very limited. You can choose C++, no thanks, or Python which is very slow. There are no good options for languages or VMs on Qt in the Java/C#/VM/Jit range of the language performance spectrum.

Re: Hyper 2, Electron based terminal

#53

Post by royjacobs » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 7:41 AM UTC

stephenr wrote: post #13

Pop quiz: what's more ridiculous, nodejs based command line utilities that do the same thing as two existing shell utilities and a pipe or a while loop etc; OR, an electron "shell"... which can then run those same nodejs "utilities"... Oh maybe that's the whole point. They want "it's javascript all the way down". I think I'd literally rather use a shell built on actual turtles. A turtle-shell, if you will.

My annoyance with Electron surfaces when it's being used for tools that you need to use a lot and that potentially are started often, with a lot of instances. Slack clients for instance, but editors and terminals as well. These are precisely the kinds of applications where you want low memory usage and milliseconds worth of startup time.

Additionally, this annoyance probably has more to do with the fact that Electron is used by developers for other developers. If it would be used to replace Excel the rage would probably be less pronounced. I'm still wondering what would happen though, because of all the subtle ways in which the UI experience would be broken for someone who's used to Excel.

Re: Hyper 2, Electron based terminal

#54

Post by sime2009 » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 7:43 AM UTC

reneberlin wrote: post #40

fahrradflucht wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has already been done [0]. [0] https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop

I'm speechless. It's monday today and the day just begins. I hope for better news along the way ...

Actually it makes a lot of sense. For an electron based browser the vast bulk of it is in the HTML/CSS/JS engine just like normal, but instead of doing the higher level code and UI chrome in C++, you just use the same language and facilities which the engine itself already provides.

Re: Hyper 2, Electron based terminal

#55

Post by caspervonb » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 7:44 AM UTC

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…

Oh and as for the title on that article, Bunch of people took offence and no one got it but it's a reference to when Balmer called GPL/LGPL cancer and hippie culture.

Re: Hyper 2, Electron based terminal

#56

Post by mateuszf » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 7:44 AM UTC

sakuronto wrote: post #41

drinchev wrote: post #38

Wow so much hate in this thread. First, the author is not doing this for his CV. Second, the benefits of using electron are enormous for any JS developer and there are a lot. Third, I also hate electron apps and wouldn’t use this app, but I’m not going to jump back to “why electron is bad” discussion, since I can’t suggest anything better in 2018.

What about good ol' QT?

I'd have to use bad old C++ with it, so how about no.

Re: Hyper 2, Electron based terminal

#57

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 7:45 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Hyper 2, Electron based terminal

#58

Post by palotasb » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 7:45 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #11

riobard wrote: post #6

If it's just drawing pixels… what's the benefit of the web stack?

- Easier to make a multiplatform application, compared to alternatives. - Makes it possible for people who don't know (and/or don't want to know) anything beyond the web stack to build "desktop" applications. - Easy to make it look nice by default, because you can reuse all the work that went into building the browser as a runtime, + you have a ton of eyecandy JS libraries to choose from.

I think you are getting down votes because you are answering 'why electron?' instead of the 'why base it on Canvas?' the GP meant. (The release notes say this version switched to Canvas rendering from DOM.) I would like to know too.

Re: Hyper 2, Electron based terminal

#59

Post by Immortalin » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 7:45 AM UTC

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…

Because it's pretty. Because you get state of the art Unicode decoding and support. Because you can get a terminal on Linux in a first class GUI system that's normalized across all major operating systems backed by billions of investment.

Re: Hyper 2, Electron based terminal

#60

Post by jekrb » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 7:47 AM UTC

reneberlin wrote: post #40

fahrradflucht wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has already been done [0]. [0] https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop

I'm speechless. It's monday today and the day just begins. I hope for better news along the way ...

Brave is actually really good from my perspective. I use it as my main mobile browser. They're looking to add support for the p2p `dat://` protocol this year as well!