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by bartread 54 days ago
> look like l33t h4xx0rs even though we're just pressing continue 15 times

I feel seen.

I also think there’s a certain element of reacting against absolutely everything becoming a bloated electron app.

I have no doubt - if it hasn’t already happened - that some apps will unironically embrace the most ridiculous option by shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end.

7 comments

> I have no doubt - if it hasn’t already happened - that some apps will unironically embrace the most ridiculous option by shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end.

Claude code is almost there

https://levelup.gitconnected.com/theres-a-react-app-running-...

Considering the insane memory consumption of claude code running in my terminal, electron was never really the problem, bad software was the culprit all along.
The culprit is using web technologies where they don't belong, which Electron is also guilty of. Claude Code is 400k lines of JavaScript for a TUI where a sane implementation in C would be two orders of magnitude less code.
Can’t say that electron does not encourage bad software, quite the opposite
It's an example of bad code that further encourages more bad code.
Yup. VSCode is really fast and memory-frugal for an Electron application of that complexity.

Likewise, Gnome has proven that you can write entire UIs in Javascript and have them be quite performant.

Electron (well, Node is a big sub-culprit) and Javascript in general just make it really easy to create a slow, bloated application.

Always has been.
Claude code is react and their desktop app is Electron. But “coding is largely a solved problem”.
> shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end

A significant number of these apps are nodejs apps so it’s not that much of a leap!

Yeah, I noticed some TUI libraries in npm when I was working on a Typescript project a couple of years back so I'm sure people are doing it.
I really wish that 1Password wasn’t an electron app. Or Spotify. (Maybe I should just use Spotify in the browser).

We need to advocate and evangelize for native apps, like RapidApi on macOS and also Tower.

Just wait till you hear about the wonders of React + Ink! Now you can have JS bloat in your terminal too!

Jokes aside, I don't understand how devs can bring themselves to ship such inefficient apps.

Except most of the TUIs I’m seeing are god awful with horrible input latency because they’ve reimplemented everything from scratch in python or whatever. Multiple hundreds of ms per keystroke: it sucks.