Cerebro App – Open-source productivity booster with a brain (opens in new tab)

> It's terrible.

It's awesome. Who cares if it takes more memory than someone would expect? That doesn't matter unless you're on a memory constrained system, in which case it's hardly the fault of developers looking to be productive. Electron is here to stay, and it is greatly improving the desktop app ecosystem imo.

> if you try to attract developer community with plugins and you have a relatively simple app, don't choose electron for that

Electron is the perfect choice. Any web developer can quickly learn to contribute to an electron app. It's far easier to build community around electron apps than native apps, because there are more web developers than any other kind.

The less electron-based running apps, the better. The only electron app I (sometimes) use is Atom.

I have switched to slack on browser, instead of the app.

Electron apps drain my mac battery super fast. It's a pity.

For instance, I am currently learning data science from the ground up (i.e. reading the fundamental mathematical literature) and doing it outside of a university program. It is disheartening to post a question, to say Cross Validated, and have a few critical commenters almost laugh the motivation out of me. So, I can emphasize.

However, on the other hand, as a software practitioner, I am often on the other side of the fence. In this field in particular it seems like there are often amateurs who decide to jump in with an arrogant disrespect for the existing community knowledge and practices. I think it's because software is very cool now (like statistics, etc.). And, in software it's easy to find some code and libraries and 'wire them together' in crude ways.

Note, I am not implying that this is the case here! I haven't even looked at the software nor read most of the comments. But, since I often see this happening, I know that such comments are expected. I'm only commenting on your perspective.

I am not against autodidacts. In fact, I am one myself. And, I encourage it. But, all autodidacts should expect and embrace criticism from the community. It sucks to take it, because often commenters are often overly harsh and blunt. But, in defense of them, every community will be like this, to some degree. And, it's expected. Many of these practitioners have spent their life doing it, and they have some right to be critical, don't they?

In spirit i agree with you.

In practice the problem here is, to use a really crude analogy:

The Cerebro developers rented an empty mall for super cheap, then opened a single restaurant in it. Some people won't mind driving all the way there and walking through the entire thing to get to the restaurant, other people will.

The advice then in that situation is to one of these:

1. Demolish the parts of the mall that aren't used, piece by piece, while trying to not knock over the restaurant situated on the third floor, so other people can build their houses on the now free space, closer to the restaurant.

2. Abandon it and build a new restaurant in the middle of the city.

Everyone recognizes that both of these are very expensive solutions and unlikely to ever be implemented, so you end up with two kind of people.

1. Those who shrug and walk away saying nothing.

2. Those who go, with various amounts of emphasis: "Aw, i wish you hadn't done that."

There is no happy middle ground possible here, sadly.

And the only difference it has is being much heavier because it's electron.

[0] http://www.getwox.com/

I use locate for now, but I'm still to find something that does it as well.

Keep a small notebook beside you and promise yourself you are going to focus on the topic at hand for a period of time. When a thought, question or search topic pops into your brain, write it in the notebook. When you have some free time you can pick up the notebook at look up all those things. Of course, I often find that coming back to them they aren't all that important at all, and feeling of desperately needing to know has gone.

Here is more of a nuclear option that lets you micro manage your activity on an os-level. Unfortunately no Linux client afaik. A bit pricy, but very customizable and very effective: https://focusme.com

1) https://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/findrun/

[1] https://github.com/appetizermonster/hain

The author seems non-hispanic, it could be a reference to X-Men: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebro

Spanish must have stolen it in an alternate universe when the X-men went back in time fighting the spanish inquisition disguised as lumberjacks and it's ok.

That's pretty much it. There's no useful way to make electron slimmer in any way, since it comes with the full chrome browser in the backpack and there's nothing you can do, because chrome's being the base of the huge pyramid with your teeny tiny bits of html and js on top.

It's useful for proto-typing or one-off apps, but for long-running things you're better of making it a chrome app directly (i.e. reusing Chrome's memory foot-print), or making it into a proper native app.

It's like a very precise search engine for your personal machine.

It's amazing how great it works, and not having that available when I'm using a computer ruins things for me.

If that is not enough, Alfred also has lots of other awesome features.

anyway, from what i can tell, cerebro is able to show you a lot more things and also has plugins. keypirinha just shows basic things like files and apps i think

Gatekeeper on Mac OS, while ostensibly a "security" restriction, is nothing more than a blatant money-grab by Apple.