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Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

So this is basically just an Electron terminal emulator with some shortcuts included? You can already do all this in a fair few existing terminal emulators, not to mention shell aliases et al. I mean I get the problem space they’re trying to solve but the landing page is so hyperbolic I’m put off investing any time to see if this actually has usability gains over what the team already do use

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Completely agree about Electron - it's really heavy. That's why we built Fig as a Swift app.

Also, just to clarify, Fig isn't a terminal emulator itself. It attaches to whichever one you currently use.

Your landing page does an absolutely terrible job explaining anything about your product though. I assume this is aimed at engineers and technical managers rather than non-technical folk (because why would a non-technical manager be using the terminal)? The fact I had to scroll 5 pages (on iOS Safari), past multiple elevator pitches, FAANG “testimonials” (who cares if a couple of engineers in Google liked your Github repo?) and sign up pages just to see a single screenshot, and not even one that does a good job at demonstrating your product, shows just how out of whack the landing page is with your target audience.

As it is, I am a manager myself and looking at standardising some of our toolchain ahead of onboarding around 8 new engineers in September (4 of who will be graduates so might benefit from tools like this) and I gave up with the idea of this when I couldn’t extrapolate how we would use and integrate it into our existing workflows.

Frankly, it was frustrating to find something that went from “ohh this might be useful” to “I’ve read their content and I still have no idea how this thing works”.

Well, TBF I grasped it quite quickly (although I viewed it on my MBP). The demonstration video on the top was quite useful to understand what it is (although I guess I leaved the tab long enough for the mp4 to load, they should compress the video - seems you couldn't see it due to load times), and the explanation that it works on any kind of terminal (including Terminal.app) implied that it's not another terminal but an add-on.

I guess they're not that polished yet as they were planing to do a Show HN...

Honestly this is really useful feedback. I think the page might be broken on mobile. There should be a large video demonstrating the product at the top.(https://withfig.com/video/final.mp4)

You're exactly the type of person we're trying to help, so we clearly need to communicate our value prop better!

If you have some time to chat, I'd love to talk. My email is matt [at] withfig.com

FYI, the animations didn't work for me in MacOS Safari (with AdGuard extension, though I'm not sure thats the reason)

Not to mention, it being Electron could[1] mean a memory hog. Granted, not all Electron apps are, but after seeing a GUI git client which ate up 800MiB+, I'm very skeptical about this technology. I don't want a shell, a chat client, a git client and an editor to take up 3-4GiB of my RAM...

[1] I can't claim that without testing, but it's a good possibility when it comes to Electron.

"Electron" and I stopped reading and closed the Fig website. Aside from using it to over-engineer this non issue of terminals (Already solved via GUI) it has been superseded by aliases, autocomplete and automation.

No point using a double negative product.

> the landing page is so hyperbolic

Well its from the typical startup launch playbook:

Humaans + Flat UI + Emojis + "FAAMNG company testimonials" + "Contact Us/Sales" = 75% VC backed bullshit.

There's no Electron involved.

I'm aghast at the level of toxicity and quick-judgment in the hacker community. It's really disappointing.

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