You can make a bad native app, but you can’t make a good Electron app.

Edit to add: Lots of people are mentioning Visual Studio Code. I agree it’s a good app in many dimensions; I didn’t mean to say that an Electron app can’t be good in some ways, even in the most important ways, but rather that Electron introduces flaws that prevent the app from being good in all ways. In particular, while faster than most Electron apps it’s still sluggish on old devices. It still loses track of files when renamed unless you do the rename through Visual Studio Code. The UI elements aren’t as polished as native let alone consistent with it, settings aren’t synced and backed up to iCloud, system-wide keyboard settings aren’t obeyed, Quick Look previews aren’t provided, etc. All of these problems were either introduced by Electron or made more difficult by it.

VS code is really good. Somehow it feels way better to program in than Xcode does.

But I don’t know any other electron apps that feel responsive. Slack, discord, Notion... all super simple apps which respond like molasses.

There are better choices than both of these imho - Appcode and Jetbrains for example.

If your example of "Good native application" is AppCode, you're beyond saving lol

thats a bit harsh - Appcode is a java app but better than Xcode and VSCode, and java is a step up from electron in performance. Xcode is faster but lacks a lot of features that Appcode has.

If you want fast native development then I recommend Delphi - but that is not PC either.

BitWig audio is a Java UI and is quite competitive with the native DAWs.

I agree.

I use vscode, but I miss the speed of sublime for large projects & the terminal emulator will crash/freeze for me occasionally (which also seems to happen in IntelliJ based editors as well)

Superhuman and VS Code are excellent apps. And are built on Electron.

VSCode runs amazingly on my 2.5 year old laptop.

And while I love the word "webshit" in itself -- it's a very pleasing word to say -- I object to it.

The web is not universally shit. It has advantages: primarily almost truly "write once, run anywhere." I run Ubuntu. I almost certainly would not be able to use VSCode on my laptop if it were not an Electron app. I am better off having an Electron version of VSCode than some native version of it existing that doesn't run on Linux.

(Also, isn't Visual Studio a native app, and hot garbage compared to VSCode? I've never used it, but that's what I hear.)

>VSCode runs amazingly on my 2.5 year old laptop.

Is this some kind of great achievement? Vim runs ten times as fast on a 28 year old PDP-11.

>The web is not universally shit.

[citation needed]

To quote the old Java saying, saying "write once, run everywhere" is a selling point of Java is like saying anal sex is great because it works on all genders. Like... maybe, but it's not really the point.

You couldn't use VSCode on Linux, but you could use any of several much better editors, and effectively double your RAM to boot.

>(Also, isn't Visual Studio a native app, and hot garbage compared to VSCode? I've never used it, but that's what I hear.)

Back when I used Windows as a dev platform, years and years ago, Visual Studio was quite pleasant. The experience of that back in the day is much better than the experiences I had with VSCode more recently.

But both of them are terrible compared to the native development environment of Linux.

>To quote the old Java saying, saying "write once, run everywhere" is a selling point of Java is like saying anal sex is great because it works on all genders. Like... maybe, but it's not really the point.

what does this mean exactly

> It has advantages: primarily almost truly "write once, run anywhere."

Wanna take a shot at porting electron to a new platform? It's only a couple dozen million lines of code.

How often do you need to do that?

Also, what major platforms don't have a modern web browser?

Same. For a long time, every time I tried VS Code, I’d go running back to Vim.

VS Code has gotten better—it has a higher ceiling than it used to but there are limitations that’ll always be there as long it’s based on Electron.

That ceiling also applies to responsiveness and adherence to the macOS UI/UX guidelines.

I’m waiting on Panic’s editor that’s in private beta. I don’t see an Electron app matching the fit, finish and polish of a native app by a developer team with the experience and track record of Panic: https://panic.com/nova/

I have been waiting excitedly for Panic's Nova to be honest. Recently my hopes have been lower because there haven't been any updates since March 2019. https://panic.com/nova/march-2019/

They’ve been posting updates on Twitter—@panic.

> There's some kind of brainwashing going on here.

Or perhaps it's because it is so commonly used.

Only takes one counter-example to dismantle this method of thought.

...........VSCode

VSCode is the most sluggish app I use on my 2019 Mac, by far. I genuinely don't understand how people can say that it feels responsive and like-native, unless they have much more performant equipment than I.

I use it because it's packed with useful functionality, but …I resent using it– I think I'd adore it if it were native.

I agree. I tried it recently for a couple of weeks and went back to Sublime.

Wtf. It really makes me wonder if we are in fact using the same thing at all?

Started using couple or three months back for a relatively large C project (with large amounts of lib includes) and so far the experience has been really good. Then switched to remote ssh devel, still really good.

What's these slugish/perf issues on vsvode all about? What am I missing?

For me it's because it could never really break the illusion I'm using a browser and that is annoying. I'm reminded of that on every little (or not so little) stutter.

I could totally work with VSCode but I just prefer the overall experience of Sublime.

My biggest gripe with Sublime has been the lack of Extensions.

Is there another?

Does there have to be?

No, but it'd let me know about other apps I should know about.

Superhuman?

Slack on macOS is Electron. Slack on iOS is native, and their app wasn't actually all that bad until they redesigned it a couple months ago and made it really, really bad :(

I’m still not over the fact that notifications on my phone don’t clear when I view the message on my computer, and this is by design because of some other big fix. It’s been almost a year

https://www.reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/dfmuhj/issue_with_io...

I wouldn’t read into that tweet because Electron doesn’t even support iOS, so saying they “do not use Electron” is equivalent to saying nothing.

It's native. Or at least it was last I checked, before they did their redesign.

How do you evaluate that? (Assuming you don't work for Slack).

Slack, renown for horrible app performance, should never be an example in any discussion about underlying architecture.

It seems poor performance is a core value at the company.

I think that's a bit unfair to Slack. I've been using it for 5 years now and it's one of the most dependable apps I've ever used. When you consider how many messages and rich content it's handling, I think they are doing a fairly decent job. I wouldn't call it slow either. If anything my biggest beef with slack is sometimes the cross-device syncing isn't perfect. And I'm unable to use it offline at all.

I am also a daily user, because it is part of my job requirements to be accessible via Slack, as such it only has a presence on the devices that belong to my employer.

> When you consider how many messages and rich content it's handling, I think they are doing a fairly decent job.

"handling"

Sending and receiving is something for a background thread to spend a fraction of a percent of a CPU core on.

The amount on-screen at any time is tiny, and should not take a significant amount of resources on a modern computer.

If it's rendering a thousand off-screen rich content messages, that's not impressive, that's it being coded badly.

Slack is hands down the worst app I’ve ever used in environments that aren’t very high latency.