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Comment by jaimehrubiks | Hacker News Reader

I'm kind of tired of the criticism on every post about an up built on electron. I mean, we all know the disadvantages it has with respect to native gtk or qt, but we also must remember the advantages it brings to developers to write multiplatform and VERY (not highest) performance apps in an easier way. Like it or not it is the era of websites. For people like me who always preferred desktop apps, this is good news because many website-like apps are ported in a "almost native way". Anyway, web technology like html+js+css is not that bad and it's evolving and improving fast as front-end.

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I've never heard someone call electron apps 'very performant'. If anything, they're "kinda performant". Even "sorta". In fact, that's the biggest complaint, that the performance flat out sucks.

For me the biggest problem with web apps in a browser are keyboard shortcuts. E.g.: does Cmd+P print the webpage or the contents of the edited document? Electron applications solve this problem. In the end it is important to stuff the stuff requiring performance into a native module and you are set. Having worked with JNI I prefer writing Node plugins and writing interfaces in HTML5 is great compared to stuff like Gtk (and even Qt)

An author can use print stylesheets to make cmd-P work as expected. Try it out in google docs for example.

Yes. But the shortcuts are not consistent between different web-applications. Inconsistency is he death for muscle memory. Also simple copying and pasting is not always doing what I think (e.g.: in Google docs) (it is partly my fault as I prefer safari and they did not have yet implemented all of the necessary APIs to make it work). Another advantage of Electron apps is that they do not have a concept of back and forward by default. There is no losing work in a text editor because one has unfocused the text field and pressed backspace

I wouldn't consider web apps "almost native" until they take up the UI paradigms and hopefully the UI design (or at least the spirit of it) of the host OS. There's nothing native about an application that doesn't look or act like it belongs on any particular platform.

Does that mean Sublime is not native, because it doesn't use the OS's theme or widgets?

Sublime still qualifies as native. It doesn't use native theming, but the UI widgets are in fact native (just heavily skinned). This is what allows it to have extremely low latency text input (compared to Atom/Brackets/VS Code) and under OS X, allows it to automatically adopt the extensive set of standard text editing shortcuts the OS implements.

I wonder if the same people would say that Atom or Visual Studio Code is a "web app."

agreed - but GTK2 is what makes the experience extra horrible when using on desktops like GNOME.

I ended up making an electron gtk3 build script for the few apps I prefer to use that choose to go the electron route: https://github.com/nikolowry/electron-gtk3

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