Web 2.0 or: “Instead of loading all code from the same URL the website now needs a dozen of different scripts from a dozen of different URLs, gives a shit about CSP and only shows a blank page when JS and/or cookies are disabled.”
Don’t worry, texteditor.com is also available as an app on Windows, macOS and Linux thanks to Electron.
It only needs 300 megabytes and you can style it with CSS.
It also only takes a single gigabyte of RAM per file being edited, Isn’t that fantastic?
So was all this bloat inevitable as hardware got better, or is there a way to go back? It feels like a ripoff that our computers are 1000x better but they’re maybe 10x faster once all the shitty software is taken into consideration.
Perhaps it’s kind of inevitable to have some bloat. For example apps these days handle most of the languages just fine including emoji, LTR/RTL and stuff. Some have pretty decent accessibility support. They can render pretty complicated interface at 8k screen reasonably fast. (often accelerated in some way) There is a ton of functionality baked in - your editor can render your html or markdown side by side with source code as you edit it. You have version control, terminal emulator, language servers, etc…
But then there’s Electron, which just takes engine capable of rendering anything and uses it to render UI, so as a result there’s not much optimization you can do. Button is actually a bunch of DOM elements wrapped in CSS… Etc… It’s just good enough for the “hardware is cheap” approach.
I think Emacs is a good example to look at. It has a ton of built in functionality and with many plugins (either custom configuration or something like Doom Emacs) you can have very capable editor very comparable to the likes of VS Code. Decades back Emacs had this reputation of being bloated, because it used Megabytes of RAM. These days it’s even more “bloated” due to all the stuff that was added since. But in absolute numbers it does not need as much resources as its Electron based peers. The difference can easily be order of magnitude or more depending on configuration.
I have a few suggestions:
- Better education. Don’t scare people who’re learning programming away from the lower-level stuff, especially as people are even getting scared to use type declarations, not just the pointers (of which I was fearmongered with in college, as they told me Java is the future).
- Better portable APIs. Thanks to WebAssembly, one could easily have both something portable in a web browser and as a native desktop app, except instead we get browsers running said applications. I had some thinking about such a project, but then I remembered my iota project (a D-native replacement of SDL/SFML/GLFW, but without bloat by including standard library features), and then stopped thinking about it immediately, since a much smaller project already causes me too much headache. (Someone has a handy guide on win32 API? I have issues on getting certain messages produced, like input language change, and I don’t know if I glimpsed over some functions that enable them and just weren’t included in the documentation of the input language change event codes.)
nope. The bloat is there mainly because it makes the job easier for the devs.
I like that you can just install it straight from the Windows Store, no need to even bother opening Edge to download it.
I’m not sure which is worse. I mean most desktop programs are just glorified web browsers anyway (i.e Electron)
What do you mean, “most?” Electron apps are the vast minority of desktop apps.
They are probably referring to the amount of progressive web apps that are out now.
But you can use more shortcuts!
I hate editors in browser. With Chrome at least --kiosk turns them in proper apps. In Firefox it’s impossible to turn off browser shortcuts and use them to work.
What barbarian do they think I am, using a mouse to do stuff on my editor. I need long complex absurd keyboard shortcuts to function
Allow me to introduce: Firefox vim keybindings extensions. So many more shortcuts if you don’t need to worry about typing characters in normal mode.
.exe? 🤮
Linux doesn’t have a standard file extension for executable files, and that wouldn’t have been good for this meme.
I hate elves. If I see any elves in my computer I’m throwing it in the forge.
Award me a proprietary Ethereum-based crypto token for editing my text with your tool and I’m sold.
Is web3.0 just https://texteditor.exe?
Kind of. First you have to buy a Texteditor token and then the license says you’re permitted to open the IPFS link in order to use Texteditor.
