Eel VS Electron

I gave up a long time ago attempting to write GUIs in pure python. I've come back to them periodically to see if the landscape has changed, but I'm always disappointed.

My current go-to python GUI solution is to use the Eel library. It renders GUIs in a web-browser like window with HTMl/CSS/JS.It lets you expose your python functions to JavaScript, so data can be easily transferred back and forth between the python and the JavaScript. And since it's just web-dev, it's pretty easy to make things look and feel good enough. Any other web-dev libraries like bootstrap and jquery can be used. It works pretty well for writing GUIs that put data analysis tools in front of my colleagues.

https://github.com/python-eel/Eel

Eel was used to implement the app and communication with the web interface.

I am calling a function from Python using eel and taking the return value. Python functions are asynchronous with JavaScript by nature. This code is combined with other variables to determine if the form can continue. allFilled() is called everytime the form field changes.

In the past, I've used QT4 and QT Designer. It was okay. It was a small mountain to climb for myself then - but certainly doable. However, there was a lot of generated code that wasn't the most concise thing. Today, I discovered Eel. Since I used QT4 in the past, I've done some web dev. Certainly, not proficient there. But Eel wasn't as big of a hurdle. In fact, it took me a fraction of the time because it is much like creating a basic website. Where there's an abundance of tutorials and tips out there for everything imaginable. Instead of downloading and adding a font, clicking through a bunch of dialogs. I just linked a Google font and updated the CSS. Stuff like that.

If you don't want a web-app, you can still use JS for GUI, using something like python-eel https://github.com/python-eel/Eel

The team at Electron have been faithfully shipping new releases almost every single month. I think they had Christmas off 🤔. This popular framework has developers writing cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. The latest update depreciates some process events, and added new modules, APIs, methods, and more. Read into all the changes in the Electron release notes. This month, Electron also introduced a new formal RFC process.

VS Code has been crashing at launch in Wayland since more than eight months ago:

https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/37531

So we talked a lot about the Atomic Design Principle, but you could just use that in any system and start creating. You could have Angular components, React Components, and Vue Components. But if you notice these don't easily work Everwhere. So the solution is to use Web Components because the modern browser can already understand these, and any Front-End framework can then utilize these components. You can use Electron for desktop (Slack, VSCode), PWA for both Android and iOS, and across all browsers Can I Use.

I'm noticing a significant boost in performance, crisper text, and better power savings. The only shortcoming is that the window which Figma will run on will lose its shadow. This is due to a technical limitation with frameless windows on Linux.

For the longest time, building desktop apps was a daunting task to web developers. That is, until technologies like Electron made creating these apps more approachable to a wider audience. Today, we’ve got a wide array of native applications built with solutions like Electron, Tauri, Capacitor, and many more. While these are great solutions, sometimes configuration can be tricky and the applications we create can become somewhat bloated in terms of memory usage.

Electron patch for version 27: https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/39823

It does, see [0]. Fun fact: Signal desktop, which uses Electron under the hood, is running without sandbox on Linux [1][2].

[0] https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/39824

[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/5195

[2] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/pull/4381

Turns out, there is an issue with the electron window not returning focus correctly on mac - https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/5495. The trick to solving is to treat quick capture as a screensaver. When closing, you hide it by setting the opacity to 0 and sending hide: command to the first responder.

Open since 2016! https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/8124