Wishlist

[sindresorhus]

Comment here if there's anything you wish existed to make it easier to create apps with Electron. Can be components, tools, docs, etc. Or any apps you wish existed.

Comment if you started working on any of the wishes.

[RangerMauve]

Bluetooth libraries that would work with it cross-platform would be amazing.

[kvnneff]

I'd love to see a guide or a simple example on getting CI working. I specifically mean the process of installing Electron on a provider such as Travis and running tests inside a headless Electron.

I've found this repo: https://github.com/atom/ci but the process is somewhat convoluted, requiring the use of APM, atom package manager. Also, CoffeeScript. I'd really love to figure out how to get Travis working in a simpler manner, using only npm and perhaps @maxogden's modules.

[max-mapper]

I got electron working headlessly on ubuntu here: https://github.com/moose-team/peerbot

i'm not sure travis would let you run xvfb though

[max-mapper]

@RangerMauve you can use noble and bleno from npm with electron. they work in OSX and Linux. not sure what the windows story is

[RangerMauve]

@maxogden yeah, I've been following both of those. The issue is that Windows is important for what I'm going to deploy. :'(

[max-mapper]

@RangerMauve gotcha. unfortunately theres nothing special about electron that will make bluetooth on windows any easier to build, since it is just io.js under the hood. so if theres any hope of bluetooth in electron it would have to come from modules like bleno/noble

[RangerMauve]

@maxogden Yeah, I'm not well versed in Windows enough to do it myself yet, either. I was thinking that it might be possible to just cheese it and use an ffi library to call Windows APIs directly from JS. Alternately my hope is that it'll be available in blink some day

[hashd]

We're working on a cross platform writing tool called Marvelous. https://github.com/hashd/Marvelous

It's still work in progress and we should hopefully have our first release for all 3 platforms by this month end.

[brooksn]

I'd like to find snippets or discussion about achieving a native-feeling UI (esp. for OS X). For example, this blog post about using an apple system font in the browser isn't about electron, but I think it's relevant.

[sindresorhus]

Request

electron-window-state - Need a library for storing and loading window state as Electron does not save/restore window size and position between loads.

More here: sindresorhus/project-ideas#9 (discuss there)

[zz85]

Current Wish: Electron App Manager
(maybe somewhat related to #95 and electron/electron#673)

Imho, Electron Apps are usually bloated because they package with their own node/chromium runtime (though I can understand why it is good at times). It is like an irony that SpaceRadar is about a hundred MB unzipped application for example. I think Chrome App approach can be pretty nice (you can download new apps pretty quickly).

So the proposition is do have an manager app somewhat along the lines of nvm/kitematic/brew. However, instead of downloading binaries, check out the git repository or source (which I believe to be much smaller than builds), and maintain a single update to date Electron binary responsible for running the apps. The app might have to install dependencies, rebuild native bindings etc but that would be in it's implementation.

Anyway just sharing this idea which is at the top of my head right now. Will be cool to know if someone is already working on this, otherwise I might attempt one when I have some time.

[sindresorhus]

@zz85 What if two apps require two different versions of Electron and neither work on the other ones version? It's a good idea in theory, but comes with a lot of complications. Electron is still in active development and its API has changed many times, even removing whole APIs at times. I think this would be more feasible when Electron turns 1.0.0.

I personally prefer the current approach. Everything is self-contained and just works. You never have to deal with dependency conflicts. Disk space is cheap today anyways, and an Electron app is 35 MB when compressed, so not that bad to download either.

I encourage you to open an issue on the Electron issue tracker so this can be discussed with the right audience.

[zz85]

@sindresorhus I agree that there would be complications. However what I'm proposing isn't intended to change the way Electron is but rather an automation for the way I'm testing Electron apps, which is checking out the code, installing dependencies less Electron, and running the app through my global Electron. For backward compatibility, there would always be an option to download packaged releases.

While self-containment is nice, perhaps I've a slightly different view as I'm stingy with my disk space (since SSD still isn't really cheap), and that I'm connected at times on mobile data (where I would prefer downloading KB of code rather than 35MB each time each app updates. unless we get chrome kind of binary diff updates, but that's a separate topic... : )

As for incompatibility, it'd be nice if electron projects works with the latest electron, just like webapps with evergreen browsers...

(oh I just realized maybe I didn't communicate well that I'm referring to open source projects since this probably wouldn't work well with closed ones)

[kokarn]

I must say i agree with @sindresorhus.
I think of this as applications, not just webpages. In that case 35MB is
nothing and even 100 or 200 is still really nothing at all.

And even SSDs are getting cheaper all the time so i don't really see that
as a point worth anything anyways :P

On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 11:06 AM Joshua Koo notifications@github.com
wrote:

@sindresorhus https://github.com/sindresorhus I agree that there would
be complications. However what I'm proposing isn't intended to change the
way Electron is but rather an automation for the way I'm testing Electron
apps, which is checking out the code, installing dependencies less
Electron, and running the app through my global Electron.

While self-containment is nice, perhaps I've a slightly different view as
I'm stingy with my disk space (since SSD still isn't really cheap), and
that I'm connected at times on mobile data (where I would prefer
downloading KB of code rather than 35MB each time each app updates. unless
we get chrome kind of binary diff updates, but that's a separate topic... :
)

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#5 (comment)
.

[parro-it]

What I would prefer is to have a way - as a developer - to install electron apps without electron-prebuilt local dependency, and run them through my global installed electron-prebuilt.

That's beacuse when I install a node module (e.g. a command line tool) that require a node version I've not installed on my machine, npm doesn't install a new node version for it automatically, it just give me an advice: "you have to install node 5 for this to work". I would expect the same for an electron app: just give me an advice, I'll be able to solve the problem by myself...

Instead, as an end user, maybe a not so experienced one, I would prefer to get a packaged app that already contains it's electron version. I will not care so much if the app weight 50Mb or 100Mb or 4Mb,
I care much that is easy to install and update.

[zz85]

Just wanted to mention that I've started on my wish with a very raw prototype https://github.com/zz85/electron-awesomeness - right now it is really simple but hopefully it gives a better idea on what I was thinking about. Feel free to try if it is useful and file any issues if necessary :)

[Thrilleratplay]

I would like to see an offline JSFiddle/Codepen clone. Preferably with preprocessors and the option to export to a local directory, Github Gist or repo. It would be a good tool to teach web development.

A project I have personally wanted to do for a while but never seem to have enough free time.

[philfreo]

I'd love to see an example (code & UI) of an Electron app that has good find-on-page / on-page-search like Chrome does with cmd-f/ctrl-f. I saw in electron/electron#2037 that it's not supported natively in Electron however that there are some methods that should help.

[winnchen]

I would like to enable page search(ctrl+f) in application.

[dkniffin]

I'd love to see an image editor built in electron. At the moment, I need something like inkscape (vector/svg editor), but something akin to gimp (raster/jpg/png editor) would also be cool. I know these are very complicated tools, but to be quite honest, the open source ones out there right now are crap.

[philfreo]

Here's are two possible starting points for someone to implement find on page search: https://github.com/edulan/electron-search-example and https://github.com/nakajmg/electron-search-text. Though I'd still like to see one that is closer to Chrome's UI.

[jenstornell]

Is there anything around a collapable file tree sidebar to start with? Similar to Windows and Mac file tree.