Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lxgr 754 days ago
Slightly off-topic, but...

> Hyper is an Electron-based terminal

Why!?

1 comments

Electron beatings will continue for as long as making a proper GUI for major platforms requires learning three different languages and four different UI toolkits, where every one of them is less flexible and harder to use than the web stack.

For developers Electron is the easiest way to have a portable UI, with very flexible and capable styling, decent text rendering, animations, and a layout and rendering engine optimized for a very broad range of use-cases, with fantastic developer tools.

I get that tradeoff, and I can see how it makes sense for apps that don't interface that much with the OS/UI they run on (although I'm still not a fan of the resource usage and the occasional UI yankiness).

But for a terminal emulator? These are pretty deeply integrated with the OS they run on and often run with elevated permissions and/or get to pass through passwords as they're entered! I can't imagine using one written in Electron.

> I can't imagine using one written in Electron.

Ok but why?