Native all the way, until you need text

Then you realise it will take months just to reach feature parity with basic native macOS behaviour: context menus, dictionary lookup, selection, accessibility, text interactions, all the small things users expect without thinking about them.

So you try WebKit to render Markdown. And it works. There are caveats, of course, but mostly it just works. Performance is good. Typography is almost perfect. You have a proper level of control.

And then, at the darkest possible moment, you think: okay, let’s generate a simple Electron project. You go to the dark side.

And you are amazed.

Text operations, Markdown rendering, good typography – all of it works out of the box, with performance you could not get even from your pure TextKit 2 implementation. macOS integrations are there too. You can even render fancy Git diffs with a few lines of code. I am not even talking about things like diffs.com.

And then you ask yourself: what went wrong?

When I say that Electron/browser-based stuff isn't as awful as people want to think or say, this is why.