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Comment by riobard | Hacker News Reader

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.

Also you can have interesting rendering possibilities like in-line display of images, charts, tables.

Longer-term: new generation of command-line tools with different ux paradigms for interactive use?

Like, <3 TERM=linux and "everything is text" but there are also a lot of possibilities here which would be interesting to explore.

Funny that people "get" jupityr notebooks but not this.

For what it's worth, I don't get Jupyter notebooks either.

I see them as a "worse is better"-style half-implementation of Org Mode's tangling functionality on a more mainstream stack. For iteratively building a document that's mixed with some code and some output and looks kinda-nice, Jupyter is good enough.

I'd totally love to see that happening. Except it isn't. I would even accept Electron if the primary motivation was to enable such a rich terminal interaction experience. But that's not what's the case here, apparently.

Also you can have interesting rendering possibilities like in-line display of images, charts, tables.

Like iTerm2? ;)

https://iterm2.com/documentation-images.html https://github.com/lunaryorn/mdcat

There are probably Linux terminals that can do the same.

Funny that people "get" jupityr notebooks but not this.

I think one reason is that Jupyter does not sell itself as a UNIX terminal, so people feel less strongly about it. Also, Jupyter uses a web browser that you probably have running anyway.

DomTerm (https://domterm.org) can "embed" HTML in the output. So to "print" hello.md in an existing DomTerm window you can do:

pandoc hello.md | domterm hcat

This does a much better job than mdcat, because it can use variable width fonts, bigger fonts for headings, and can handle raw html.

Those possibilities are the reason why I started my terminal project, Extraterm. You can get an idea of its unique features here: http://extraterm.org/features.html. The advantage that Electron has over the alternatives is access to a massive ecosystem of libraries and components which can be reused. For example, if I want to add support for showing tabular data directly, I can grab an existing JS component, maybe a spreadsheet component even, and integrate it.

I've done a little bit of experimenting with "alternate UX and display paradigms" shall we say, and that is a long term goal of the project too. Right now the current implementation focus is on filling out the list of standard boring terminal features which everyone needs and expects, plus some more performance work.

The comparison with jupityr notebooks is a good one and it would be nice to support a richer experience while still being keyboard and command line focused.

jupityr notebooks provides something that is difficult to get else where: multiplayer interactive programming sessions. its also not overly heavy.

Electron is just half remembered dream of flash, but without the efficiency or programming environment. That compiled once and worked the same everywhere.

We threw away flash because the iphone was underpowered, only for it to be replaced with the horror that is modern js centered webdev.

> We threw away flash because the iphone was underpowered, only for it to be replaced with the horror that is modern js centered webdev.

Also a sad thing: Flash sucked for building UIs, because it did not have a set of standardized elements and interactions built in. I'm thinking of all the trivial details like mouse pointer changing when you hover over a text field, or a text field that supports arrow navigation, selection, copying and pasting, a context menu, etc.

Now the browser, as a runtime, has all those expected UI interactions built into all the standard HTML components. And what does the web crowd do? They throw it all away by building their own half-assed reimplementations of every UI element. There's lots of man-hours being wasted replicating the problems of Flash.

>- Easier to make a multiplatform application, compared to alternatives.

If your target machine can run an electron based shell, you can leave the shell alone and just run your web app.

>- 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.

Again, changing the shell does what exactly? Just build the web app you knew how to build...

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.

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