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I’m trying it, and it does looks nice.
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That’s the state of computing in 2023: a browser disguised as a native app running 15 layers of Javascript is used as a friggin terminal. And nobody bats an eyelids, as if the utter insanity of it made any sense.
And the installer is 117M compressed. That’s MEGABYTES… For a terminal!
The mind boggles…
The only stupid part is bundling a whole browser for a webpage. HTML5 as an executable format is fantastic - all the bullshit Java promised, except people actually use it. But for some godforsaken reason, everybody ships a platform-specific… portable OS… with every single program.
Electron and whatnot have turned “Java but good” into “Docker but awful.”
I don’t understand why desktop JS apps don’t use React Native at least. It’s still JavaScript but doesn’t use a browser, and renders to native UI widgets. Far lighter than Electron.
The disadvantage with React Native is that you still have to maintain a UI for each platform because it maps to native widgets while a web UI works the same on every platform.
Business/application logic can be 80-90% of an app’s code, and all of it can be reused across platforms. The actual UI rendering is just a small part of it.
In the UI code, some of it does have to differ across platforms but it’s mostly the lower level components like buttons, text fields, etc. Some product UI code built on top of those abstractions can be reused across platforms.
Sure, but it’s still more work than a web UI, and using a web UI is a lot more flexible. For example, say you want to render a chart or some other visualization. It’s trivial to do with a web UI, but can be a tricky problem with native widgets, especially if you want to keep the UX consistent across platforms. I agree that using React Native can work fine in a lot of cases, but I can also understand the appeal of using the web UI stack. Another aspect is likely familiarity, people use the tools they know, and if somebody is already comfortable with a particular ecosystem they’re likely to leverage it.
Waiting for the “fRee rAm iS unUseD raM” comment.
Except it’s not: free ram is where disk cache lives, so the more free ram you have - the faster your system is (kinda)
I mean, at least for Linux, I was under the impression that the disk cache only stores programs that have already been loaded once, since there’s not much point loading something from disk to cache if you never actually load it later.
Yap, that’s my understanding too
I will absolutely not use an electron terminal.
Looks like Electron. Oh boy…
From their FAQ:
Q: What shells does Wave Terminal support?
A: We currently only support bash. […]Seems at least dishonest to advertise it as a “terminal” if it works only with a specific shell. It’s okay to have extra features enabled by escape codes emitted by the shell, but if it goes beyond that, I’d say it’s not just a terminal anymore.
So, a browser frontend for bash… Nah, that sales pitch sucks (ram)
Looks like bloat to me
“modern”, when it comes to terminals, usually translates to Javascript / web / electron
We are used to badly optimized webapps but there’s some that definitely manage to be snappy wothout taking too much ressources
Not that I dont dislike electron anyway, but I’d hazard a guess that most of the jank we see in electron apps is more to do with javascript and overengineered web UI frameworks than the browser runtime. If it runs like shit in a browser then it wont be much better ported to electron.
Kinda yes, sadly. However, at least they offer some reasoning for it like AI integration with the terminal.
Ditch Vim for quick updates.
GAAAAAAAASP
heresy
I’m unsure that I would find this useful. While I might want a good solution to view web content on the terminal (with a modern, w3c standards rendering engine) so that I can do less outside of the terminal, I don’t think I see the utility of using web tech to power my zsh and vim usage. I am enjoying my balance of utility and perf with kitty.
I hope you have a good experience and share your findings.
Too fat and unnecessary. Just use the regular bash shell that comes with your distro.
Bash isn’t a terminal. It’s a shell. You can run Bash within XTerm, Gnome Terminal, Konsole, or even Windows Terminal.