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Comment by aylmao | Hacker News Reader

> Nobody

This is like claiming nobody wants to write C because no one wants to manage their own memory in 2019, or miss out on all the cool new packages in the JS ecosystem.

Evidently _some people_ do. I can assure you there's at least number _n > 1_ of people who care more about app size than either of your points.

I personally wrote a side project in system web-view, because I don't want my macOS-only system-tray application to weigh 115+MB to make sure I have APIs I don't need in platforms I don't support.

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No need to go too far to find an example: Sublime Text and Sublime Merge.

While this route is probably not for quick app deployment, but boy can it kick ass when properly done in C++ with custom GUI framework.

I love Sublime Text and Sublime Merge. I love their philosophy towards software design. I love how they value user experience above everything else.

There are very few pieces of software that give you so much pleasure and joy in using them on a day to day basis.

Yet so many still migrate to VSCode which is electron based. So maybe the difference you value isn’t valued enough to be worth it for most authors.

I get the point you’re making, but you might be in the minority here.

Citation needed. How many exactly?

You are comparing apples with pears. Sublime can't be compared to VS Code because the former is basically an advanced editor while the latter is an IDE (like PhpStorm or Atom).

And I highly doubt that many users switching from Sublime to VS Code. They use one or the other for a specific reason, like a blazing fast and distraction free editing experience in Sublime - something you do not have in VS Code or any other IDE, imo.

The line between advanced text editor and lightweight IDE is basically non existent.

Plenty of former sublime users are on VS code now.

I use VSCode for programming (Typescript), but it's also become a great replacement for my usual native text editor (Notepad2). I love how performant yet, feature-packed and extensible it is, and since I keep my notes in Markdown format, the `yzhang.markdown-all-in-one` extension is really useful.

So? Plenty of former VScode users are on Sublime, Vim or Emacs now.

I really don't get your point.

The person I responded too was saying that Sublime and VS Code are incomparable because they are different types of software.

I was disagreeing with his distinction between advanced text editors and lightweight IDEs.

This is a bit of a surprising thing for me to hear, because I found Sublime Text's user experience to be rather poor, and certainly inferior to its Electron-based competitor VS Code.

I would never say “poor”, although I found myself moving from Sublime Text to VS Code for most of my projects. However, ST is undeniably so much faster. If I need to edit large files or do something quickly, I am happy that I can use it.

Have you tried searching commands with the "command Palette". It makes everything discoverable for me. I personally LOVE the UX

Sublime feels like a marriage between TUI & GUI. * Everything is controllable by keyboard * Mouse based menus for one-time usage * Command Palette is awesome and very useful * FAST * Scriptable

Really hope they can keep being profitable.

fman (fman.io) for a dual pane file manager. Utilizing Qt, proprietary, cross platform, and follows the design philosophy of Sublime Text.

I mean, fuck the users. Will nobody think of the poor poor developers?

Never heard a non-programmer user complain about the Spotify or Slack desktop apps, but that’s just me.

I have absolutely heard non-programmer users complain about the Slack desktop app. They may not be able to diagnose why it is being slow or unresponsive, but they can still tell when it's being slow and unresponsive. And while the term "power user" has fallen out of favor, there are still users who aren't programmers, per se, who nonetheless understand concepts like memory and CPU usage.

non-programmer users don't complain because they don't know how bad they are fucked.

A few weeks ago my non-technical neighbours told me that their computer was "a bit slow" and if I could "install a new antivirus". Here's what "a bit slow" meant :

- windows took 7 minutes to boot

- IE took more than a minute to open

And of course it wasn't always like that, but the proverbial frog was boiled long enough that it took a lot of time for them to be pissed enough to look for help (the poor guys had 4 antivirus programs running concurrently - on a machine with 2 gigs of ram).

In contrast, if my browser takes more than 3 or so seconds to open I start looking for what's wrong.

Horror. 4 antivirus programs in 2G RAM

That makes me think of what school and uni digital illiteracy should look like.

given that the aforementioned neighbors are more than 60 years old I don't think you can really blame school and university

That's a result of the crazy acceleration current technology is moving with. My comment was kinda addressing the future.

That's because programmers know that it could be much faster if done with native technologies.

Non-programmers assume this is normal and now they are used to slow apps. Also, they don't know that the reason their whole system is very slow is slack.

Maybe you don't listen.

"Apps" like Slack are on my hate list even above desktop Java apps. Seriously, I can't understand how come it's acceptable to use >1GB of RAM to display 10 lines of text.

It's easy. The text is marked up, mixed in with images, video and other miscellaneous rich content, and includes remote resources and third party embeds.

There is no native UI toolkit that can do this properly, nor is there a cross platform way for 3rd parties to integrate even if there was. So web it is, with a runtime designed for being able to rapidly page in/out the entire UI from one screen to the next, even if that is entirely unnecessary for a single app.

Grouches have been shitting on the web, not entirely for bad reasons, but it's made them miss the fact that web has been stealing their lunch for a reason. If you live inside a terminal, your needs have diverged from the majority, and you're likely relying on crutches that are considered impossibly clunky by most.

The only ray of hope here is what FB has done with React and React Native, but I imagine it will take another 10 years before the unix geeks will want to admit there is something in that "webshit" worth looking at.

macOS Messages (aka iMessage) has been rendering text chat using HTML views for years, and it doesn't use gobs of memory.

The problem isn't that the text part is rendered using HTML. That actually makes sense - multiple desktop applications that compose/render user generated rich content rely on HTML (or something converted to HTML) and a web view of some description to render that content: mail, chat, etc.

The problem is rendering the entire application's chrome using Web technologies, and then running all of that inside a web view from a browser that is known to have the resource usage of a porcine creature with an eating disorder.

> The only ray of hope here is what FB has done with React and React Native

No. The ray of hope is that people realise web technologies are not the best choice, and the way they're used in Electron is fucking atrocious.

> macOS Messages (aka iMessage) has been rendering text chat using HTML views for years, and it doesn't use gobs of memory.

Keep in mind that the OS and the hardware it runs on comes from the same company that does iMessages. You shouldn't discount the amount of control that brings.

Contrast that to people who have to work with different OS platforms and hardware specifications.

Adium did exactly the same thing - rendering chat contents using HTML. It also didn’t use gobs of memory.

The hard work of optimisation has been done by apple, any app can embed a web view for content and take advantage of the optimisations in the system html renderer.

Exactly.

I refuse to use Electron apps - they clearly work in JS so the web version will work fine, and I get to keep the sandbox protections, content blocking etc of Safari.

And I use IDEA Ultimate almost daily. Yes, it uses a ton of RAM - but it uses a ton of RAM and is powerful.

I've not yet seen another IDE with the same capabilities (i.e. built in static analysis of dynamic languages like PHP, with refactoring support, etc).

I have oodles of memory (64GB) so I could of course run Slack and not "run out". But the key thing here is that Slack doesn't just use memory, it wastes it.

IDEA uses memory to make me more productive

Why would you even use the slack "app"? I don't like Slack but I have to use it, so I open it in a browser tab. Same crap, less memory use.

What do you think about intellij platform?

Spotify I can understand but Slack's client is hot garbage. Discord has more features and crashes less...

Which is a shame, because they are both awful.

It is unfortunate that this unsaid sentiment has pervaded all the engineering organizations I've worked for... except the one that made software for developers. Funny that.

It's not that difficult. You ship products to specific usergroups and don't need to exceed their tolerances. That 5% of users really hate Electron - or even know what it is - simply just doesn't matter to Slack.

And besides, of that 5% of people who hate it, a large percentage of them use it anyway because they have to.

Overengineered products for the minority don't do well unless you charge a huge premium for it, something my field unfortunately does a lot of and I have to deal with.

Developers are users too.

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