I’ve converted to Nylas for email, Slack for chat, Hyper for my terminal, Visual Studio Code for development and a whole lot more.
I realize I’m kind of on the fringe here, but zero of those options run on my OpenBSD desktop. The much ballyhooed cross platform support of electron has not yet swallowed my terminal, editor, chat client, etc. My gripes about electron memory and CPU waste are really on behalf of others. I myself am not in a position to suffer such horrors. :)
I don’t know what Macbook you are running, but Slack slows down mine (2015 with 2.9 i5), or at the very best uses too many resources.
I definitely would not use more than one Electron app a time. I deleted the Slack app and just use the website (I close the tab when I am working deeply on something). Atom gets opened one a week I think.
I’ll never understand the people that are all in the Electron bandwagon, and I say this as someone who enjoys writing JS.
So… Complete servers with web frontend (HTML 5 and CSS 3), the server being written with a framework (Electron), itself being written in the language of the frontend (JavaScript) transformed to the work at the backend (NodeJS) shipped within every desktop app are still easier to ship, fix and maintain, than a plain native app in portable C?
you probably have a few desktop apps that you use daily without even realizing they’re built using web technology.
No, I notice, they’re huge, bulky, and if my computer is doing anything else, slow.
I run several chat clients based on web technologies: My IRC client is a chrome extension, at work we use Mattermost and occasionally I use Whatsapp web.
Mattermost, since it uses Electron, is the slowest of the bunch, everything else starts superfast since it’s based on the already running Chrome instance rather than spinning up their own subsystem.
Then there’s Telegram, the desktop client has a custom chrome and beautiful animations just like everyone nowadays (I dislike the recent revamp to a Material Design-style UI, but it’s not that bad) and I always wondered why it’s so snappy and never skips a beat, a brief look at the source told me: it’s C++ / Qt.
And let’s not even start on the other fields: I try to use VS Code at work, but the constant slowdowns and chocking is not making me regret spending money on Sublime Text one bit.
I’d rather just use an actual web application.
I was going to use the Fastmail web app just until I worked out how to get IMAP to work with a ‘proper client’, but it’s good enough I’ve never bothered.
The slack web interface doesn’t seem any worse than the Electron app.
A lot of my stuff seems to involve Github these days, or some other web based tracker.
Other than web stuff, there’s a handful of terminal stuff … vi, git, python’s repl, micropython utils.
Oooh, gitk, that’s a proper X application and I use that a bit. There’s probably a way to do that with gitweb though?
Ah, finally! OpenSCAD! That’s an X application which wouldn’t … oh, wait, http://joostn.github.io/OpenJsCad/
I realize I’m kind of on the fringe here, but zero of those options run on my OpenBSD desktop. The much ballyhooed cross platform support of electron has not yet swallowed my terminal, editor, chat client, etc. My gripes about electron memory and CPU waste are really on behalf of others. I myself am not in a position to suffer such horrors. :)
[Comment removed by author]
I don’t know what Macbook you are running, but Slack slows down mine (2015 with 2.9 i5), or at the very best uses too many resources.
I definitely would not use more than one Electron app a time. I deleted the Slack app and just use the website (I close the tab when I am working deeply on something). Atom gets opened one a week I think.
I’ll never understand the people that are all in the Electron bandwagon, and I say this as someone who enjoys writing JS.
[Comment removed by author]
Electron ? What is Electron ? ;)
As Niklaus Wirth said: “…we do not consider it as good engineering practice to consume a resource lavishly just because it happens to be cheap”
Hell, the printer client I’ve installed for work has a memory leak and eats up 1.3GB of RAM. 166MB is modest.
So… Complete servers with web frontend (HTML 5 and CSS 3), the server being written with a framework (Electron), itself being written in the language of the frontend (JavaScript) transformed to the work at the backend (NodeJS) shipped within every desktop app are still easier to ship, fix and maintain, than a plain native app in portable C?
Now I understand Wirth’s law!
No, I notice, they’re huge, bulky, and if my computer is doing anything else, slow.
I run several chat clients based on web technologies: My IRC client is a chrome extension, at work we use Mattermost and occasionally I use Whatsapp web.
Mattermost, since it uses Electron, is the slowest of the bunch, everything else starts superfast since it’s based on the already running Chrome instance rather than spinning up their own subsystem.
Then there’s Telegram, the desktop client has a custom chrome and beautiful animations just like everyone nowadays (I dislike the recent revamp to a Material Design-style UI, but it’s not that bad) and I always wondered why it’s so snappy and never skips a beat, a brief look at the source told me: it’s C++ / Qt.
And let’s not even start on the other fields: I try to use VS Code at work, but the constant slowdowns and chocking is not making me regret spending money on Sublime Text one bit.
I’d rather just use an actual web application. I was going to use the Fastmail web app just until I worked out how to get IMAP to work with a ‘proper client’, but it’s good enough I’ve never bothered. The slack web interface doesn’t seem any worse than the Electron app. A lot of my stuff seems to involve Github these days, or some other web based tracker. Other than web stuff, there’s a handful of terminal stuff … vi, git, python’s repl, micropython utils. Oooh, gitk, that’s a proper X application and I use that a bit. There’s probably a way to do that with gitweb though? Ah, finally! OpenSCAD! That’s an X application which wouldn’t … oh, wait, http://joostn.github.io/OpenJsCad/