10 ms·

Atom Shell is now Electron

152 points by hswolff 11y ago

adrusi 11y ago
What does Electron do differently from NW? I get that one is Chromium and the other is just webkit, but what concrete, practical differences are there?
- AdrianRossouw 11y ago
  There's a wiki entry for that : https://github.com/atom/electron/blob/master/docs/development/atom-shell-vs-node-webkit.md https://github.com/atom/electron/blob/master/docs/developmen...
- dubcanada 11y ago
  Both are Chromium. Node Webkit has a forked version of Chromium Source with modifications (removed the event handler and replace with NodeJS one and a bunch of others). Seen at https://github.com/nwjs/chromium.src https://github.com/nwjs/chromium.src Electron uses the Content framework and has no modifications to Chromium. Directly calling the required parts from the source (example https://github.com/atom/electron/tree/master/chromium_src/chrome/browser/extensions https://github.com/atom/electron/tree/master/chromium_src/ch...). That is the major difference, in regards to architecture. Basically in Atom you need to create the Window, and in NodeWebkit you always have a Window and you need to do stuff to that Window. The other ones include things like backers, NodeWebkit is backed mostly by Intel, as one of their developers is who is building it. Atom is backed by Github bunch of others.
- brianzelip 11y ago
  Here's a Stack Overflow answer to that question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23509356/node-webkit-vs-electron http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23509356/node-webkit-vs-e...
AdrianRossouw 11y ago
interesting to see how many things have already switched to building on electron. Slack, Mapbox and more.
netcraft 11y ago
Im curious about the name change. What do they stand to gain from losing all of the history of atom shell search results?
- AdrianRossouw 11y ago
  i think it's because electron is being used to build more than just atom. having it be that deeply associated with the other brand reduces the visibility of the project?
- Igglyboo 11y ago
  Atom Shell is no longer tied to Atom the text editor by name. It makes sense to change the name as Electron becomes more popular in projects outside of Atom.
- phillips1012 11y ago
  It would still be easy to find the project via google. Just googling "atom-shell" will probably get you this article, and from there a user would figure out that it's been renamed.
- cos2pi 11y ago
  Because now they can write a blog post about it, which duly appears on HN's front page.
frik 11y ago
Is it suitable for WYSIWYG or a plain text & source code editor? Does it originate initially from Mozilla's Ace text editor? https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace The name changes are a bit confusing (Mozilla Bespin -> Skywriter -> Ace ->(?) Atom -> Electron).
- mikewhy 11y ago
  Atom Shell != Atom It is the, well, shell of the Atom editor.
- quanticle 11y ago
  So, it looks like there's a number of things you're confused about. First, Atom doesn't have anything to do with Mozilla's Ace or Bespin. Ace and Bespin (now Cloud 9) are tools that live on a server, which you access through a browser. Atom is a completely separate project (started by Github, not Mozilla) to build a native text editor using web technologies. The text editor is a native application, but it exposes a Javascript API for plugins. After a while, Github realized that the infrastructure needed to make Atom work (e.g. installers, updates, notifications, etc.) could also be used by other projects, so that code was split off into "Atom Shell". It's this project that's getting renamed to "Electron".
ars 11y ago
That's a seriously confusing name. I thought this was a physics story of some kind. Additionally it's also a bad name because it's impossible to google.
- usaphp 11y ago
  It seems nowadays there is no "good" name to google. Every single word in a dictionary is already being used by something else.
  - saurik 11y ago
    Which argues that good names are generally not a single dictionary word. This is like saying "nowadays there are no good passwords people can't guess: people can just try the entire dictionary in a few seconds". If you list major brands, the vast majority of them, even of really really old brands, are either made up words or phrases.
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      The difference is that branding is important. Ease of learning and remembering a name. Very different to passwords, which should be computer-generated and computer-stored, you should never know your passwords.
  - smacktoward 11y ago
    Then call it "Electron Shell," which would at least be more Googleable than "Electron" by itself is.
    - PetitPrince 11y ago
      Unfortunately, an electron shell is also a widely used term in chemistry and physics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_shell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_shell
  - lnanek2 11y ago
    So call it two words. ElectronEnv, AtomEditor, AtomIDE, etc..
anon3_ 11y ago
The thing that turned me away from Atom and its' development is CoffeeScript. As someone who loves idiomatic JS, I still can't get why you'd pick a language that makes tooling and debugging a nightmare. It's also a kick in the gut to efforts to fix the shortcomings of ECMAScript like ES6 [1]. [1] https://github.com/lukehoban/es6features https://github.com/lukehoban/es6features
- gmac 11y ago
  Your comment fills me with equal parts irritation and curiosity, just because it's so far from my experience. I use CoffeeScript every day, and I experience not even the mildest of tooling or debugging hiccups. And I find CoffeeScript hits such a sweet spot — some of the best bits of Ruby and Python syntax, with the first class functions and raw speed of JavaScript. Mozilla's source maps implementation is pure JS, so you can take that anywhere (e.g. I use it with JavaScriptCore on iOS). Can you elaborate on these nightmares?
  - sesteel 11y ago
    I second this; though, to be fair, source maps in AtomShell have been flaky at times when selecting breakpoints with CoffeeScript. I have turned my source mapping off and debug the unminified resultant JavaScript.
- thom_nic 11y ago
  You actually don't have to touch coffeescript to develop for Atom or Electron. EDIT: here's a demo app with zero CoffeeScript: https://github.com/thom-nic/electron-demo https://github.com/thom-nic/electron-demo
- spinlock 11y ago
  That's like saying you won't use Rails because it's written in Ruby and not C. Also, it's nice to work in a language that has the right features and not just all the features. I like CoffeeScript as much for what it doesn't have as for what it does have. I recently saw this piece of code: new Array(26) .map(function (item, index) { return String.fromCharCode(65 + index); }) as a "heads up" for map lovers. That's the kind of code that people write when they're tacking the latest new feature onto someplace that it doesn't belong. This code isn't just semantically wrong, it's stylistically wrong. Having a less schizophrenic language helps jr guys avoid code like the above.
jjangsangy 11y ago
You guys should probably release nucleus before hooli does!
yzh 11y ago
I'm expecting neutron and proton too, that will make a whole atom.
- samatman 11y ago
  That's a deuterium, it's a whole particle more than you need.
yellowapple 11y ago
Electron's / Atom Shell's homepage isn't doing a good job of explaining what it is (as someone who's unfamiliar with it). Is it a site-specific-browser implementation? It's certainly not a "shell" in the normal sense of the term.
- tetrep 11y ago
  >Electron is the cross-platform application shell we originally built for the Atom editor to handle the Chromium/Node.js event loop integration and native APIs. Sounds pretty straightforward to me. They created APIs for Node.js to allow people to make cross-platform applications, such as Atom (a text editor).
zyxley 11y ago
This would interest me more if there was a good automatic build process for it (in the style of node-grunt-webkit-builder). As it is you still have to do a bunch of the packaging manually (or design your own shell script for it), and for whatever inane reason, `npm install electron-prebuilt` only downloads the binary for your current platform, so you can't even make a replicable build process by using it as a base and using scripts that copy the different binaries.
cygnus_a 11y ago
Wait, this article isn't about physics? boooooring
teleclimber 11y ago
I'm glad to see Electron / Atom-Shell moving forwards, but I wish they'd publish a roadmap. There are things (like copy/paste) that are lacking and I'd like to know what the plans are. As it stands it's mostly a wait-and-see kind of deal, which is a bit disconcerting on big projects.
hobarrera 11y ago
Is it me, or does it sound a bit bloated: > It now includes automatic app updates, Windows installers, crash reporting, notifications, and other useful native app features * automatic app updates : We have distribution repositories for this. * windows installers: Doesn't window have it's own like app store now (market something?) * notifications: which we already had on all major OSs for years.
- RobAley 11y ago
  Obviously you don't have to use any of those features, they won't slow your app down just by being available (maybe a tiny overhead in distributed code size, but meh). - auto updates : primarily useful for commercial software that isn't "eligible" for, or chooses not to pay to use, commercial app stores. Or other apps that for whatever reason don't meet the criteria for public repositories and don't want the hassle (for the publisher or consumer) of using a private repo. - Windows installers : same reasoning as above. - Notifications : I believe its a standardised cross-platform api onto the existing system-specific notification apis, not a new notification system.
stuaxo 11y ago
Awesome, may they continue naming things after Acorn computers of the 80s.
ilaksh 11y ago
Would it be possible to combine the project with Cordova? I don't use PCs or laptops anymore because they are outdated.

152 points by hswolff 11y ago

What does Electron do differently from NW? I get that one is Chromium and the other is just webkit, but what concrete, practical differences are there?

AdrianRossouw 11y ago
There's a wiki entry for that : https://github.com/atom/electron/blob/master/docs/development/atom-shell-vs-node-webkit.md https://github.com/atom/electron/blob/master/docs/developmen...
dubcanada 11y ago
Both are Chromium. Node Webkit has a forked version of Chromium Source with modifications (removed the event handler and replace with NodeJS one and a bunch of others). Seen at https://github.com/nwjs/chromium.src https://github.com/nwjs/chromium.src Electron uses the Content framework and has no modifications to Chromium. Directly calling the required parts from the source (example https://github.com/atom/electron/tree/master/chromium_src/chrome/browser/extensions https://github.com/atom/electron/tree/master/chromium_src/ch...). That is the major difference, in regards to architecture. Basically in Atom you need to create the Window, and in NodeWebkit you always have a Window and you need to do stuff to that Window. The other ones include things like backers, NodeWebkit is backed mostly by Intel, as one of their developers is who is building it. Atom is backed by Github bunch of others.
brianzelip 11y ago
Here's a Stack Overflow answer to that question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23509356/node-webkit-vs-electron http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23509356/node-webkit-vs-e...

AdrianRossouw 11y ago

interesting to see how many things have already switched to building on electron. Slack, Mapbox and more.

netcraft 11y ago

Im curious about the name change. What do they stand to gain from losing all of the history of atom shell search results?

AdrianRossouw 11y ago
i think it's because electron is being used to build more than just atom. having it be that deeply associated with the other brand reduces the visibility of the project?
Igglyboo 11y ago
Atom Shell is no longer tied to Atom the text editor by name. It makes sense to change the name as Electron becomes more popular in projects outside of Atom.
phillips1012 11y ago
It would still be easy to find the project via google. Just googling "atom-shell" will probably get you this article, and from there a user would figure out that it's been renamed.
cos2pi 11y ago
Because now they can write a blog post about it, which duly appears on HN's front page.

frik 11y ago

Is it suitable for WYSIWYG or a plain text & source code editor? Does it originate initially from Mozilla's Ace text editor? https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace The name changes are a bit confusing (Mozilla Bespin -> Skywriter -> Ace ->(?) Atom -> Electron).

mikewhy 11y ago
Atom Shell != Atom It is the, well, shell of the Atom editor.
quanticle 11y ago
So, it looks like there's a number of things you're confused about. First, Atom doesn't have anything to do with Mozilla's Ace or Bespin. Ace and Bespin (now Cloud 9) are tools that live on a server, which you access through a browser. Atom is a completely separate project (started by Github, not Mozilla) to build a native text editor using web technologies. The text editor is a native application, but it exposes a Javascript API for plugins. After a while, Github realized that the infrastructure needed to make Atom work (e.g. installers, updates, notifications, etc.) could also be used by other projects, so that code was split off into "Atom Shell". It's this project that's getting renamed to "Electron".

ars 11y ago

That's a seriously confusing name. I thought this was a physics story of some kind. Additionally it's also a bad name because it's impossible to google.

usaphp 11y ago
It seems nowadays there is no "good" name to google. Every single word in a dictionary is already being used by something else.
- saurik 11y ago
  Which argues that good names are generally not a single dictionary word. This is like saying "nowadays there are no good passwords people can't guess: people can just try the entire dictionary in a few seconds". If you list major brands, the vast majority of them, even of really really old brands, are either made up words or phrases.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    The difference is that branding is important. Ease of learning and remembering a name. Very different to passwords, which should be computer-generated and computer-stored, you should never know your passwords.
- smacktoward 11y ago
  Then call it "Electron Shell," which would at least be more Googleable than "Electron" by itself is.
  - PetitPrince 11y ago
    Unfortunately, an electron shell is also a widely used term in chemistry and physics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_shell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_shell
- lnanek2 11y ago
  So call it two words. ElectronEnv, AtomEditor, AtomIDE, etc..

anon3_ 11y ago

The thing that turned me away from Atom and its' development is CoffeeScript. As someone who loves idiomatic JS, I still can't get why you'd pick a language that makes tooling and debugging a nightmare. It's also a kick in the gut to efforts to fix the shortcomings of ECMAScript like ES6 [1]. [1] https://github.com/lukehoban/es6features https://github.com/lukehoban/es6features

gmac 11y ago
Your comment fills me with equal parts irritation and curiosity, just because it's so far from my experience. I use CoffeeScript every day, and I experience not even the mildest of tooling or debugging hiccups. And I find CoffeeScript hits such a sweet spot — some of the best bits of Ruby and Python syntax, with the first class functions and raw speed of JavaScript. Mozilla's source maps implementation is pure JS, so you can take that anywhere (e.g. I use it with JavaScriptCore on iOS). Can you elaborate on these nightmares?
- sesteel 11y ago
  I second this; though, to be fair, source maps in AtomShell have been flaky at times when selecting breakpoints with CoffeeScript. I have turned my source mapping off and debug the unminified resultant JavaScript.
thom_nic 11y ago
You actually don't have to touch coffeescript to develop for Atom or Electron. EDIT: here's a demo app with zero CoffeeScript: https://github.com/thom-nic/electron-demo https://github.com/thom-nic/electron-demo
spinlock 11y ago
That's like saying you won't use Rails because it's written in Ruby and not C. Also, it's nice to work in a language that has the right features and not just all the features. I like CoffeeScript as much for what it doesn't have as for what it does have. I recently saw this piece of code: new Array(26) .map(function (item, index) { return String.fromCharCode(65 + index); }) as a "heads up" for map lovers. That's the kind of code that people write when they're tacking the latest new feature onto someplace that it doesn't belong. This code isn't just semantically wrong, it's stylistically wrong. Having a less schizophrenic language helps jr guys avoid code like the above.

jjangsangy 11y ago

You guys should probably release nucleus before hooli does!

yzh 11y ago

I'm expecting neutron and proton too, that will make a whole atom.

samatman 11y ago
That's a deuterium, it's a whole particle more than you need.

yellowapple 11y ago

Electron's / Atom Shell's homepage isn't doing a good job of explaining what it is (as someone who's unfamiliar with it). Is it a site-specific-browser implementation? It's certainly not a "shell" in the normal sense of the term.

tetrep 11y ago
>Electron is the cross-platform application shell we originally built for the Atom editor to handle the Chromium/Node.js event loop integration and native APIs. Sounds pretty straightforward to me. They created APIs for Node.js to allow people to make cross-platform applications, such as Atom (a text editor).

zyxley 11y ago

This would interest me more if there was a good automatic build process for it (in the style of node-grunt-webkit-builder). As it is you still have to do a bunch of the packaging manually (or design your own shell script for it), and for whatever inane reason, `npm install electron-prebuilt` only downloads the binary for your current platform, so you can't even make a replicable build process by using it as a base and using scripts that copy the different binaries.

cygnus_a 11y ago

Wait, this article isn't about physics? boooooring

teleclimber 11y ago

I'm glad to see Electron / Atom-Shell moving forwards, but I wish they'd publish a roadmap. There are things (like copy/paste) that are lacking and I'd like to know what the plans are. As it stands it's mostly a wait-and-see kind of deal, which is a bit disconcerting on big projects.

hobarrera 11y ago

Is it me, or does it sound a bit bloated: > It now includes automatic app updates, Windows installers, crash reporting, notifications, and other useful native app features * automatic app updates : We have distribution repositories for this. * windows installers: Doesn't window have it's own like app store now (market something?) * notifications: which we already had on all major OSs for years.

RobAley 11y ago
Obviously you don't have to use any of those features, they won't slow your app down just by being available (maybe a tiny overhead in distributed code size, but meh). - auto updates : primarily useful for commercial software that isn't "eligible" for, or chooses not to pay to use, commercial app stores. Or other apps that for whatever reason don't meet the criteria for public repositories and don't want the hassle (for the publisher or consumer) of using a private repo. - Windows installers : same reasoning as above. - Notifications : I believe its a standardised cross-platform api onto the existing system-specific notification apis, not a new notification system.

stuaxo 11y ago

Awesome, may they continue naming things after Acorn computers of the 80s.

ilaksh 11y ago

Would it be possible to combine the project with Cordova? I don't use PCs or laptops anymore because they are outdated.