| > I hate these posts, because Hacker News is incapable of talking about an Electron based project productively. Oni maintainer here! I agree - I get stressed out sometimes when this gets posted to HN for that reason ;) I'll piggyback here because this is near the top, but I'll give a couple quick reasons why Electron was chosen for this project: - Development speed As mentioned in another comment, the React ecosystem has some excellent development tools around hot-reloading / live-reloading. I never found this sort of 'live-reload' workflow in any of the C/C++ toolchains I've used. (Would be interested if that has changed!) For a very small team, this is an important consideration! It's the difference between Oni existing as an Electron app vs. not existing at all. - Developers Oni is an open source project, and I open-sourced it because I wanted help building it (and I've been fortunate to work with some amazing contributors [1]). When you look at the last StackOverflow Developer Survey [2], web tech is overwhelmingly at the top - if I want help, I should pick the tech stack that has the broadest appeal. Every editor is an exercise in trade-offs, and of course Electron brings trade-offs of its own. Oni is an experiment in a different (not necessarily better, because that's subjective and relative to each person's workflow) set of trade-offs than other editors - an attempt to bring together the "modern" functionality of editors like Code/Atom with Vim. It resonates with some people, but it's not going to be for everyone, and that's OK. Even if you don't use Oni or agree with the tech stack, these sorts of experiments are important, because if new ideas or workflows work well... they can find their way into your editor of choice, too. One other note - I focused a lot on Electron, but the project wouldn't be here without neovim, either! They've done excellent work, and there is quite a variety of front-ends - so even if Oni isn't your thing, I'd encourage to check out that project as well as some of the front-ends for it [3]. [1] - https://github.com/onivim/oni/graphs/contributors [2] - https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology [3] - https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects |