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Comment by _hao | Hacker News Reader

How about we actually create more performant native tools? I'm sick of the trend where we have this beastly hardware and things are actually getting slower and slower with each generation.

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In my opinion, Electron wasn’t designed to be like this. It was originally created for Atom, to be customizable. The choice of using and bundling Chromium is for ease of customizability.

Web technology for desktop apps will be prominent because we are lazy. A lot of people know JavaScript/HTML/CSS or just web technology in general, so why not just use it rather than learning a new language like Swift or C++ (for some)?

Tauri looks promising. My personal thoughts is that it’s much easier to create apps via Tauri than Electron. At least, so far. The template used for using Svelte to create Tauri apps is much shorter than the one for Electron.

react native is like that (has a css engine), but the name react is so tainted these days.

Maybe you should ask your OS author to do that instead of begging the community to make a product for you. This isn't even based around the concept of making the greatest text editor, just reviving an old one that people like.

This is a problem directly related to the quality/ease of use of frameworks.

In practice, all the facilities provided by Electron could be provided by a mix of standard libraries and system calls.

Electron solves a bunch of tedious problems in a nice cross-platform package. The performance cost is OK for most people, especially with high quality projects such as VSCode.

Unfortunately, I don't see any big player investing time and money in a nice cross-platform native framework that could offer the same capabilities as Electron.

Tauri, Flutter, and some Rust based GUI frameworks all come to mind.

Tauri doesn't solve any of the problems of Electron except download size, and it trades that off for a more annoying developer experience.

It does solve them, albeit impartially. Downloaded bundle size, RAM usage, CPU usage all decrease, plus it uses your native webview so you're not downloading a browser every time.

However, it doesn't solve them fully, so yes I do still think natively compiled apps like those of Flutter or Rust based GUI frameworks like Iced are better.

Qt was the de facto standard before electron

Yes, and it is half-decent.

Still bloated and complex IMHO.

> Unfortunately, I don't see any big player investing time and money in a nice cross-platform native framework that could offer the same capabilities as Electron.

I'm working on Slint: https://slint-ui.com

Nova by Panic is in this vein of bringing back great native software but the community remains small

Because they cornered themselves into a niche by using an Apple-only stack.

Sublime Text is available on all three desktop OSes, built with C++/OpenGL for the performance intensive parts, and it works beautifully.

Yep. They also charge $100 for their full license (not even perpetual btw) which is down-right insulting. I wouldn't even download their demo on my Mac.

How is it insulting of them to want to charge for their software?

My Macbook cost ~$1,000, I'm not going to pay 1/10th of that price for a text editor that works on a single machine. I'd even buy Sublime before giving Nova an honest shot.

This is the worst take

Speak for yourself, I get to edit text and keep my $100.

I guess I don't see the correlation. If your time isn't worth spending $100 for a text editor then you probably shouldn't

What would be an appropriate price?

Free? It's a text editor, not World of Warcraft.

Does it have ads between opening new document tabs, like mobile text editors? :D

Do they? You must be using some pretty terrible mobile text editors...

I don't care too much about the price.

I'm happy to pay a premium for great software that I use almost all the time.

I would not subscribe to anything recurrent though.

I get it, especially for a desktop software. I think Sublime’s new model is a good balance, in that you get updates for 3(?) years from license purchase, and after you can still use it as it was when the license ran out, but need to pay for the updates from then on. It does nag you but you can disable the update check and the only visible thing is in the corner saying you should buy a new license.

I think a subscription model can work if done right. It’s unreasonable to expect work on software to be free (and great if it is, like with so many open source programs and libraries), but it also isn’t okay to require payment in perpetuity just to use the program. With these in mind I think models like Sublime’s or Sketch’s are the right balance.

Sublime's "new model" is the same one the DAW industry has used to scalp career musicians for years. You know what that inspired? Piracy. Lots and lots of piracy. Just look at Avid's premium offerings - oppressively expensive recurring licenses that force any hobbyist musician to pirate the software. Or look at IDA Pro, same principle applies there.

Obviously it's my fault for expecting anyone to build Mac software for free, but there are already great (free!) native text editors on Mac. If you're paying $100 for a cocoa UI version of software that already exists, frankly you're a fool.

I don’t quite get it. Are you seriously saying that people who pay for software that has a free alternative are fools?

In the case of text editors, yes.

> Because they cornered themselves into a niche by using an Apple-only stack.

HN: We demand native IDEs.

Panic: Here's a native IDE that uses platform APIs for the most native look and feel possible.

HN: That's too native, idiots.

"Cross-platform" is attached to those statements 90% of the time, including this time, but go on.

who says you have to pick between native and cross-platform? The term "native" is confusing because some people use it to mean native performance (QT), and some people use it to mean native UI.

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