Atom was kinda revolutionary in its plugin support and everything IIRC.
Well, now that Atom has been replaced by VSCode, which is also an electron app, the original Atom devs, or at least some of them, are creating Zed. Zed’s written in Rust and uses a lot less memory.
Of course it’s not yet as mature and they’re trying to earn money by integrating AI and selling that as a service. BUT the AI is voluntary and even if you do want to use it, you don’t have to pay to use their AI (which comes with a free tier if you DO want to use it), you can literally run your own model in ollama.
It’s not perfect, but I love how little RAM it uses compared to VSCode and (shudders) the Jetbrains suite (which I normally love, but hate the RAM and CPU usage, it can drive my computer pretty slow)
still have the patch they sent for people who published packages. I made a theme no one but me used but still! Pre microsoft github was cool
Got that patch still in it’s brown envelope somewhere in a drawer, for doing a syntax highlighting plugin.
They were indeed cool
It has become my favorite editor, even though I don’t need or want the AI stuff. They do something that I do quite appreciate, that I wish other apps (looking at you, Firefox) would do:
In the AI section of the settings, the first thing is a toggle that turns off all AI features.
It shouldn’t have AI features by default though. Just make that functionality a plugin that can be downloaded separately.
But companies like to make money default though.
They also developed their own Rust UI library and open-sourced it.
Didn’t Sublime Text come before Atom?
it did, but this is about electron, which isn’t relevant to sublime. sublime’s plugins mechanism is a little different from atom, which is much more like emacs
Yes, but the plugin ecosystem really was pioneered by sublime and then ported over everywhere. A big reason atom was so successful is the plugin and themes were compatible.
I thought sublime text used textmate plug-ins at first?
Well maybe it did but I wasn’t aware!
That explains alot. I have both PyCharm and RustRover open as I
stealconvert stuff from a project I found. Anywho I was typing in discord and I was typing faster than it rendered and I thought that was strangeI’ve had PyCharm max out 3 or 4 CPU cores out of the 6 I have :/ I do have several million lines of code indexed by it though
Historically I’d say Emacs plugin system predates atom and sublime, and was certainly as impressive in its flexibility.
Lutris is impressive when it comes to game launchers and RAM efficiency, especially when compared to the ones using Electron.
Kinda depressing what numbers are considered impressive these days.
Jesus Christ, Steam at 1.4 GB and you are expected to run that WHILE PLAYING GAMES? That made my eyes pop outta my head.
There’s no way that’s normal. I’m pretty sure mine only uses a couple hundred.
Maybe they left it running for a while. The current Steam Client is basically an Electron App.
I miss the old Steam Client that was made entirely in Valve’s own GUI Framework which was written in C++.
Who knows, maybe this dram scarcity will cause a change of heart and make people optimise more again. :)
The bubble will pop before that
Why would they? Ram hasn’t been a problem for more than a decade relating to UI.
Electron apps being 500MB simply isnt a problem. People aren’t loading 15 seperate instances, at most power users are loading like 3.
For real, I remember when an entire game being over a 20 MiB made me hesitate to download it because it’d take a while.
The Half Life demo was 50MB. Took me 4 tries to get it over dialup. Played till the sun came up!
This is why I always run my personal projects through upx
Nobody’s mentioning the system monitor taking 227MiB?
I remember the stories my father told me of his early dev days… “so the mainframe we wrote the whole national social security system for had 8K of RAM”.
Mine too. war stories of 16k of RAM and 20MB hard disk drives the size of washing machines.
NodeJS is worse. One dude just had to write a cli based JavaScript runtime and holy hell now entire backends run on the least performant runtime possible.
You can bash the Javascript language all you want, but don’t come for its performance lol. Nodejs was very fast across the board when it came out, and still beats most scripting languages. Even some bigger runtimes in IO.
Its performance as a backend server is abysmal compared to standard compiled languages.
It’s absolutely wasteful to use it.
The reality is that most backends don’t use compiled languages, but stuff like PHP, Java and Python.
NodeJS scores very high on performance, concurrency, and especially IO, in that category.
And calling it abysmal compared to compiled languages is not fair, but yes, there are much better alternatives.
Yeah, and all because god forbid you give your (future) employees time to learn another language besides JavaScript. Nope, line must go up so programming must be further commodified.
Kate my beloved
My gripe with Kate is that whenever I open a file and get an LSP error it displays a pulsing warning notification in the lower left of the window. This might be okay except that I cannot read things if something is moving in my peripheral vision and there is also apparently no way to suppress this pulsing warning notification other than to disable the LSP features entirely. I want to use kwrite because at that point I might as well, but there is a long-standing bug in plasma that causes Kate to be defaulted to over kwrite for some file types despite my preferences!
I still prefer this to vscode, but I just need to vent a bit
It’s kind of an abomination when VsCode, supposed to be a lighter IDE, runs like dogshit compared to JetBrains, a fuckin’ Java based IDE. Since when was Java light on RAM?
(Caveat: I haven’t directly compared their memory usage, my experience is in very difference codebases for each)
Lmao this is quite frankly, horseshit, upvoted by people who have never used an IDE.
VScode is lightweight, snappy, and fast to open. VSCodium gives you all of that without any of the Microsoft. And even runs in a web browser.
It’s not “horseshit” - I gave you a caveat precisely so that you can understand the limitations of my comparison, and so that you don’t need to be so antagonistic.
lightweight
I launched VSCode fresh this morning. Just now, 4 hours later, I closed it and watched my system memory usage: 1.3GB. I am doing remote development, so there’s a whole server process as well which is chomping a few GB. My old laptop repeatedly ground to a halt until the OOM killer woke up/I rebooted as its measly 32GB of RAM couldn’t cope with two VSCode sessions (plus other normal apps) after a while.
In my experience VSCode on Windows runs like dogshit. I blame Windows for that. VSCode on Linux runs like a dream. I can have four different sessions open and it still runs great (I haven’t tested more than that because I’ve never had a reason to).
I can confirm this has been my experience as well.
Anectdotally, the only people I know who say vscode is lightweight and snappy are devs that have have primarily used it, visual studio, jet brains, or some other common and bloated application.
Two VSCode sessions are NOT the problem if your system with 32GB of ram is stalling lmao
Drawing strong conclusions like ‘VSCode is an abomination that runs like dogshit and is worse than an Oracle product’, from an admittedly flawed comparison that does not demonstrate that, is inviting some antagonism.
Electron is the abomination, not VSCode, and JetBrains IDEs are developed by… JetBrains, not Oracle.
+1
For stuff like editing massive files or huge folders, the least stuttery, fastest IDE for me is… VScode. Jetbrains (last I tried it) is awful.
Code may not use 1MB of RAM or idle dead asleep, but it utilizes the CPU/GPU efficiently.
Now, extensions are the caveat, like any app that supports extensions. Those can bog it down real quick.
It’s not really an IDE and it’s not lightweight either.
It’s not snappy. Sometimes just moving up a couple lines fast causes my caret to lag, which is not pleasant.
That might have more to do with when you have lots of plugins for LSPs, etc, but who uses vscode without any plugins?
Claiming that VSCode is not an IDE is just pedantic.
It is literally just a modular IDE that lets you pick and choose which piece you want rather then being like Visual Studio or XCode that is tailored for a single language / development flow.
Hell you still have to download core parts of XCode / VS after you download and install them, like the development frameworks for your targets, does that mean that they’re not actually IDEs?
I will concede on the “not really an IDE” part. You’re right you can set it up to be like one.
I say it’s not mostly because it isn’t marketed as one. It’s marketed as just a source code (text) editor.
It’s not lightweight in terms of memory but it’s definitely not slower than jetbrains. I use both frequently, but prefer vs code because it feels much snappier to use.
Did you ever use Atom?
Meanwhile my Linux runtime still boots for 1G and Emacs is looking pretty good right now lol
… Now got the idea of doing lemmy through Emacs.
There’s probably a mode for that.
… ah, there’s one… https://codeberg.org/martianh/lem.el
Looking pretty good right now. ;D
Hey, I’m posting this via lem.el! I’ve been using it for a few months now.
Could still use some work, but far better than using a Web Browser.
Notepad++ my beloved
i doo doo love it too.
does it have syntax support for Gcode yet? I do CnC (not the kinky kind) and I love to see shit in color. there’s only a few specialized editors that I have come across that do this reasonably well…Iirc you can create custom syntax highlighting formats for notepad++. So if it’s not there by default, someone else might have made a file for it, or you can start making one yourself, as the format was easy to understand. It’s been like a decade since I’ve used it, but it should be somewhere in the menus.
Linux wins again. Still runs on same hardware as 10 years ago. :) No forced updates by any big corp.
Electron apps are on Linux too
In terms of performance yeah. Though not every old device keeps working. You’re still vulnerable to driver support for newer kernels. My old Thinkpad no longer functions properly because the Nvidia drivers are not compatible with newer kernels. I can either have an unsafe machine that runs fine or an up-to-date machine that can barely open a web browser.
Nvidia yeah. The source of many many linux issues.
I struck lucky. Never had any issues with nvidia on linux in all my >2 decades using linux.
Still prefer AMD though. Straight through.
I’ve had 1 faulty driver since 2011, so I just downgraded in 10 seconds and waited for the next patch
Damn that’s very lucky. Every device with Nvidia hardware that I installed Linux on has at some point during updates or whatever gone to shit. However I must say that it has become way better in recent years. My Thinkpad was the worst because it was my first Linux device and it had an integrated Intel gpu and a dedicated Nvidia GPU and getting it to work was horror. In the end a friend of mine who was better at Linux just forced it to always use the Nvidia card because then at least stuff worked reliably ™.
But even then it pretty much always died during Ubuntu release updates. I’ve nuked my whole system once because the screen went black (due to GPU drivers presumably) during one and after an hour or so I forcefully turned off the laptop because I couldn’t do anything anymore. After restarting into a tty my laptop was in some sort of limbo between 2 Ubuntu versions and I basically just had to reinstall.
Ever since I made Linux (Arch btw) my main OS for gaming at the start of this year it has been quite stable though. I did switch to LTS kernels and after that everything has been pretty chill.
Yeah I got amd graphics 3 years ago and the same day, all those weird issues with graphics artifacts or suspend bugs just went away.
If you didnt have any of those, you are Indeed lucky. I had many of them through the years.
And here I was thinking this was about emacs and lisp. Yougster complaining about not knowing how to quit Vi smh they have never experienced the horrors of emacs
i use neovim btw
Scintilla my beloved
(This is the text editor component in Geany and Notepad++)
I’m sorry my comment is not deep enough to be his irrelevant to the topic but I gotta ask: Do you know a text editor which is just notepad but remembers the last session when you close it? I just need a scratchpad, even notepad++ is too fancy for my needs but that’s what I was using on windows. Now I use kate but it feels like I’m killing a mosquito with a rocket launcher when a book cover would do.
Unless you want to get fancy for the sake of not being fancy, you will likely be best just sticking with Kate.
Basic editing can be done in vi or nano or even piped to a file via she’ll. I don’t think any of those are necessarily better or worse than using Kate. Vi and nano would probably be faster but you would need to be in a terminal already.
That said, I am curious as well if anyone has a better answer.
On KDE Plasma, I would stick with Kate and hide/disable some the fancier interface features. It might seem like overkill, but since it’s built from common components that other KDE apps use anyway, the effective resource consumption will probably be light. And Kate is quick.
On a Gtk desktop, you might try Mousepad. This is what I used before moving away from Xfce.
I use geany btw
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The alternative to Electron not existing is that you have slower developed, clunkier software, that’s buggier and has fewer features.
There is no magic bullet of being like ‘just code the exact same thing in C’. There are tradeoffs to every development framework.
The happy medium is Tauri or Wails. No (less) bloat. People should stop using electron and google tech.
Thank you for saying this. I’m seeing this thinking, have people used native apps recently? They’re not as great as people say. Have they tried coding a UI in a native library instead of the holy HTML CSS JS trifecta? It’s usually fairly miserable and usually extremely non-customizable by comparison.
All this hating on Electron, hating on UE5, etc. really rubs me the wrong way. Firstly because people talk about optimization and “the good old days” while ignoring that we have completely different requirements these days. The new Witcher game isn’t fucking Quake. It’s gonna use some hardware. What do you want people to do? Implement custom rendering engines for every game? That’s the same as saying you want less games, because most teams literally cannot do that for various reasons, and the same applies to the Electron apps.
Like, I get it. Things should be optimized. But I feel like “software is unoptimized now” is mostly a meme propagated by tech and gaming YouTubers who don’t really know what they’re talking about, through an audience of wannabes who don’t really know what they’re talking about. People whining about le yandere dev toothbrush!1!1! And le undertale dialogue if statements!1!1!. E.g I remember hearing people saying that because borderlands has a cel-shaded effect it should be cheaper to render - a completely wrong and backwards statement.
It’s incredible how gamers think they understand rendering technology just because they play a lot of video games. And similarly I don’t like when developers (and probably a lot of non-developers) make a lot of assumptions about other people’s apps. See the complaints about Spotify memory usage. We don’t know anything about how Spotify works internally. There could be an algorithm running to determine which songs to queue up next which is analyzing multiple songs at once, or all sorts of other things. It’s so presumptuous to just look at an app in Task Manager and be like “pathetic, I could do better”, especially if it runs without problems on your device. And maybe it is built with Electron? So what? That just means that you’re paying some RAM in order to get an always updated UI that is matching what you get everywhere else. Like are we just gonna neglect that Electron provides a basically fully homogenous experience across all platforms with no extra code needed? We’re just gonna act like that’s worth nothing? It’s so entitled to say “nooooo I need you to spend an extra $2M/yr paying a Windows 8 UI dev team so that the Windows 8 Native App can have a full ten years of service and it can use 80 MB instead of 1 GB of RAM so that way I can also use this app and 200 other glorious native apps all simultaneously but also I don’t want to pay any more for the product and I don’t care if you’re a solo developer because back in my day solo developers authored papers about their custom algorithms and if you don’t do that but with my new 100x more demanding requirements you’re trash”.
Have they tried coding a UI in a native library instead of the holy HTML CSS JS trifecta? It’s usually fairly miserable and usually extremely non-customizable by comparison.
🙋♂️ I have. Exactly because Electron = bloat. Granted it was just a small side project that I spent like a month or so building. I wanted to learn GTK4, Adwaita, GNOME Blueprints, and Vala.
I personally didn’t think it was too miserable (again small project, not a ton of specialized needs). However, I 10000% completely agree with the “extremely non-customizable by comparison”. I can totally see why companies don’t want to look like a generic OS app. Getting the Bitwarden app to look like Bitwarden on Linux seems like it would be waaay harder and more time consuming than just reusing their existing HTML, CSS, and JS codebase. At least in my month of messing with GTK, it seems like desktop UIs have wwwwaaaaayyyyyyy less control over the UI than webapps do, at least by default. I’m guessing you can write more Vala to get a more custom UI in GTK, but again seems like waaaaayy more work for something highly custom.
By the end, I thought: Electron = bloat, but also Electron = apps existing at all.
the problem isn’t electron, the problem is that A) html is the only truly cross platform UI framework and B) that html (and the web stack in general) has way too many features and is way too complex, because Google’s been bolting features onto it for decades.
I must be hallucinating here. It clearly states a lot of OSes, but maybe it’s just me.
