Comment by jonatanheyman

> However, it would never have been possible for me to make Heynote for all of Mac, Windows and Linux, on my spare time and within a reasonable timeframe, without Electron.

I'm confused - browsers already do this for you - From what I can tell you aren't using any specific APIs necessitating electron?

You also could easily have a live demo since it's a client side app.

> Yes, 200+ MB of RAM seems quite excessive in theory, but in practice it's less than 1% of the total RAM memory of my laptop (24 GB).

You should consider that people would be adding this to their workflow. So it's not not 200MB/Total RAM but instead it's 200MB/Remaining memory

Mine has 32GB Total total but less then 2GB free (and the only reason it's free is because it was swapped), which would make this ~10% of my free memory. This means when I run webpack or other things like that it swaps even worse.

This feels like one of those situations where a PWA with local storage might be a winning play. Since it doesn't actually need filesystem access or some of the other integrations electron provides. In my case, at least, I do pretty well always have at least one chromium-type browser running, so that would cross off the download objection (which was mild) and the RAM overhead (which was more serious, today at least).

Consider Tauri[1] as well. It uses the native WebViews on the various platforms instead of bundling Chromium.

FWIW, we also have an Electron app, in part because the integration with native APIs (which we use) is fairly full-featured with Electron. But if I was greenfield starting an app today I'd probably try Tauri. For your app it looks like you're not trying to do too much outside the WebView so might be worth checking out.

[1] https://tauri.app/

Could it have been a PWA? I have seen some progressive web apps give an option to install as an app when you open them in your browser. Have thought about making a PWA for my kid which I could then install on my phone.

I have a total of 4 GB ram on my laptop. Background programs consume about 2 gb and windows around 1.5. Thay leaves me with around 500 MB free.

a web app (PWA) would be perfect :)

You might consider Flutter for desktop apps next time, as they are compiled to machine code and won't be nearly as heavy as Electron, plus you get automatic mobile and web support.