react-nodegui VS Ink

In fact, there's a version with a React wrapper, pretty much similar to React Native

If you are strictly looking to make a desktop app, I would suggest looking at https://react.nodegui.org/ it is really easy to use and develop.

I have to use Discord and Element on a regular basis (which both use Electron). They both use an unreasonable amount of RAM, and I feel this even more as my laptop is quite old and has 4GB of RAM.

I keep looking for alternatives to Electron, which wouldn't require such heavy resources to run, but my searches always seem to come up short. There are a number of solutions that are either dead or are not ready for production yet, such as React NodeGUI[0], Proton Native[1] or react-native-desktop-qt[2].

There's react-native-windows, but I'm not running Windows, and even if that did gain Linux compatibility it seems that they're quite focused on Microsoft-owned platforms.

Is "just stick Chromium into all your apps" seriously the best we can do as an industry? It's resource-inefficient to high heaven, not to mention that it's slow and doesn't integrate with the native platform styles at all. As a JavaScript developer, I'm quite surprised this is the best there is for cross-platform JavaScript development.

[0]: https://github.com/nodegui/react-nodegui

React NodeGUI is slowly gaining popularity for bringing react directly to the desktop development experience, powered by Qt5.

Also, for React desktop apps, have a look on React NodeGUI, you will notice Qt 😉

On the React and Vue github repos the README contains this disclaimer:

I was going to name this piece by piece or the building blocks of, but I want that sweet, sweet SEO. In my last post I kind of brushed on NodeGUI and one of the negatives I listed was it was a bit light on examples so I since decided to remedy that by contributing to the project here and here thus far. I also got involved with the Vue version of NodeGUI, it’s not as polished or production ready as the react one yet but I hope to help with that.

I've always wanted to build a CLI tool, and when I realized that you can build one using React with Ink, I converted my Python script into a CLI tool.

⚠️ Git for Windows Terminal is currently not supported, and the tool is limited to ink. We will look for alternatives later. Please use CMD, Vscode terminal's Git... terminal

There is a good solution for some of those cases - ink. With ink, I can implement text-based UI with knowledge of React, which is neat but there are still some caveats for my usages:

Looks cool, right? Building a similar UI in the terminal without any library would be quite hard, though, thanks to Ink it's almost as easy as building any frontend UI with React.

ink?

I'm writing a CLI with ink. Writing async code is important as to not block the rendering and respond to user input. I have a few loading animations that update every 100ms. Synchronous operations can make the animation hang for >500ms, making the animation choppy.

You get the comfort of using react components instead of fighting with HTML tables to make your emails look nice. I think it's awesome! It's analog to what ink[0] does with CLI outputs. Sure, you could write fancy CLI outputs in bash, but ink takes the pain out of it and makes it easy.

[0] https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink

Due to Node's asynchronous behavior, it makes Node great for long-running processes that make a lot of HTTP requests, database calls, and other async ops, like a web server or a REST API. However, if I am making a CLI tool for pretty much personal use only, with very minimal async operations, then blocking the event loop with a synchronous function that will resolve almost immediately will make no difference perceivable to a human brain or have any speed benefits that someone can actually observe (think `fs.readFileSync` or `require('dotenv') of 10 line config file, or a quick embedded db (sqlite) query with only ~100 records. I'm wondering what the best way to implement the database part of the app synchronous. I can read/write to JSON files but it would be tricky because the data is relational, and some complex joins and other data wrangling operations are required (complex to perform in JS but are easy to implement in a SQL statement). It's not important what the operations are, that's not the point of this post. This is mostly a personal project of interest: making this CLI tool completely avoiding any async operations/using no promises. I would like to use node tho, as I said this is just out of interest and I also want to experiment with several CLI libraries such as Ink or Cliffy.