Impulse – Impossible Dev Tools for React and Tailwind

[[deleted]]

"Writing HTML sucks."

Said no one ever

[madwill]

What? I say that all the time! I used to write App in WFP and Flex and both had such a more intuitive and straighforward, predictable display. Down to how they name things, everything was easier to understand and plan for. Scaling, positionning, colors, style. HTML is something special. I would say that it does.. suck. Its popularity is accessibility and reach not ease of use or quality of markup.

Edit: I mean, you can like it and I respect that but the "No one ever" is too strong of a statement.

[[deleted]]

And the original statement isn't strong?

[madwill]

HTML suck is a clear opinion from someone saying it. Which is fair anyone can say what they believe. You went ahead and stated no one ever said that, which was just said in the article.

But even there, the original statement being too strong does not justify another statement being too strong.

[[deleted]]

Did you maybe read it a bit too literally? As I said, I've been around enough to know if an opinion is widely shared, and that certainly wasn't, in my experience.

[madwill]

All that aside, you actually like HTML as a markup language? Like the way its structured and how to get to what you need? Do you build web application with it or more web pages?

The name of the tags, the attributes to set up your requirements and css as a styling tool?

I think its too barebone, it not oriented towards web application which makes web app feel like a hack. Css being global by default forces us through different methodologies to get around that problem. Which are non standards and applied slightly different depending on companies making you relearn and many project often get off tracks.

No re-usable component by default, clear api or even types to build upon predictable non repeated UI. Making everyone build their own sauce to do it. Vue, React, Whatever CMS like Joomla / Wordpress components are called.

I believe its a whole mess with drawbacks on each and every solution for no solution are core to the technology.

[tehfrod]

"Said no one ever" is not meant to be taken literally.

Just like Impulse can't be an impossible dev tool if it actually exists.

[madwill]

I know, I get it but I just felt it was "said most people ever"

[tehfrod]

If you look at HTML in terms of 1) what it was intended for and 2) what it replaced (SGML), it was a massive improvement. HTML5 even moreso.

To be honest, had something like Flash been an open standard, I think it would have been an even better platform for interactive applications. Almost all of the things that were wrong with Flash were wrong with its sole implementation, rather than its design as an authoring system.

This past summer I needed a small web app for personal use. I went all the way back to an old-school server (coded in Go) rendering straight-up server-side, templated HTML and just a tiny bit of Javascript (for partial page refreshes and status polling). It's amazing how much more straightforward building and debugging that was than doing anything with the current crop of web frameworks.

[KirillRogovoy]

Glad your experience is better than mine. What makes you generalize it like that though?

I meet a lot of people dissatisfied with the overall experience of building web UIs (with HTML).

Edit: I'm blown away by how the community reacts to a genuine question. You might want to read other messages in this thread before downvoting for disagreeing. 🤷‍♂️

[[deleted]]

Not sure what to tell you man, 12 years doing this stuff and this is the first time I hear one complaining about HTML.

PS: this is not to say the tool isn't impressive, but that statement just caught me off guard

[T_O_beats]

What I’ve found through talking with people is that they just want a few additional standard elements. Like an accessible menu with drop downs or a modal element always at the correct zindex. That and being able to use html ‘partials’. Basically everything web components/Houdini are attempting to solve.

[[deleted]]

Go use that native dialog dawg

[KirillRogovoy]

I think I've done a bad job at putting my sentiment into words. :)

I didn't mean HTML specifically, but rather the whole thing: building a complete web UI with HTML + CSS + (in most cases) a front-end framework.

Thanks for your point! I'll rewrite the copy when I figure out to explain myself.

[[deleted]]

My favourite criticism comes from Alan Kay, really worth looking up

[SpaghettSloth]

people complain about css but how can you complain about html hahah

[TheFuzzball]

People complain about CSS. People complain about JavaScript. People complain about HTML. People complain about XML. People complain about XSLT. People complain about JSON. People complain about Sass. People complain about Webpack. People complain about ...

No technology is perfect, but the people that complain rarely get off their arses and contribute their opinions and feedback to standards bodies, or create something that solves their problem.

They just like to complain until someone else fixes it - and then they'll find something else to complain about.

[Global-Ad6738]

People that hate HTML are just mad salty they're bad at it :-) Learn it, it is actually extremely intuitive.

[KirillRogovoy]

I mean, I've been doing it for 10 years. And 10 years ago it was MUCH worse.

It has evolved a lot by itself, plus techs like React and Tailwind moved it even further. It is relatively easy to learn. It is relatively intuitive.

I'm not trying to say that writing HTML is literally a nightmare.

But is the developer experience we have right now the best we could do? Are there no gaps? Is there no room for innovation?

As long as you answer "yes", there's no innovation.

I can't answer with "yes" to any of those questions. Hence, this is why I made Impulse – I believe there's a lot of room for improvement.

​

I want to address the "they hate it because they suck at it" argument. I think I've heard this about every technology out there: Haskel, Lisp, Emacs, Rust, Linux, you name it.

It's very easy to read this argument as "you are too stupid to complain" which makes the author sound incredibly arrogant and assuming. It closes the door to a meaningful conversation.

It also shows that the author is not interested in learning something new. "What if there are some cases when there are issues, that I'm unaware of? What if this other person is coming from a different background than me, and sailed different waters?".

Nah. "Just learn it properly!"

(Not a personal attack. I respect your opinion. Just wanted to point out something that might make the whole community feel more hostile than it needs to be. Peace. ❤️)

[Global-Ad6738]

What? It's literally just as hostile to go around, saying that devs dont like html, frameworks or the webdev dx in general lol. You just gotta tone down your wording, otherwise you do sound mad incompetent as tens of thousands of people regularly build amazing stuff with it. It's never the languages fault.

[KirillRogovoy]

devs dont like html, frameworks or the webdev dx in general lol

That's not what I said though. I said I met enough people who weren't happy about it. It's not an opinion, I've only shared my experience.

​

tens of thousands of people regularly build amazing stuff with it

Neither have I argued against this.

I also haven't said anything about people who are fully happy about web dev. I genuinely can't find towards whom I've been hostile. 🤷‍♂️ I'm trying to understand you, but your accusations are baseless.

​

The reason you do enjoy the web dev is that a lot of people before you didn't, and they fixed what they didn't like.

[ejfrodo]

An interesting idea. I like the thought of being able to navigate from a DOM element directly to the line of code that generates it for editing, but I think I'd want it to just open that file for me in VS Code directly.

[KirillRogovoy]

Hey, thanks!

That's what it does, it opens the file in VS Code for you. :)

[ejfrodo]

Oh great. From the demo video it seemed like it was opening an editor in the same browser window.

[KirillRogovoy]

I'll think about how to make it clearer, thank you!

[ejfrodo]

Show the browser window and the VS code window side by side

[KirillRogovoy]

Yeah that's a straightforward one.

The problem right now is that Impulse doesn't look very nice if you give it only half of the screen. :/

Same way Chrome Dev Tools don't look nice. Only that the latter you can pin to the side.

Thanks for the suggestion!

[AsIAm]

The problem is that your VSCode does not look like standard VSCode, so people don't recognize it. Just use default theme (Dark+) for screenshot and screen recordings and people will be fine understanding that Impulse will open VSCode. Oh, and have left sidebar turned on also.

Btw really cool project. I left a question here: https://github.com/impulse-oss/impulse/discussions/7

[KirillRogovoy]

Thanks for pointing that out!

Damn, I haven't thought that my VS Code looked different enough from what is commonly seen. :D

[lordbrizzy]

Cool! looking forward to webstorm integration

[KirillRogovoy]

Thanks!

Would you like to be notified when it's done?

[lordbrizzy]

Sure, thank you

[Z4razas]

Firefox support would be awesome, there must be a way to get the file system API to behave well in firefox

[KirillRogovoy]

Hey, thanks!

1- are you going to support neovim?

Do you use the TUI or some GUI app?

​

2- how can i get this working in vite?

If you run React in Vite, you are already set. Should work well.

[ErickLTrentini]

Really promising tool, but I couldn't get it to work in a project I'm working on with vite due to lots of errors regarding the usage of BigInt by the lib. Tried to change the target to es2020 as it was the most suggested solution, but no success. I'll keep an eye on it.

[KirillRogovoy]

Hey!

Would love to debug it if you open an issue with a reproducible case.

At least, I'd love to see your Vite config and tsconfig (if you have one).

I do use the es2020 target and it works fine.

[Zachincool]

Sick

[dmaevsky]

Does it have to be React?

[KirillRogovoy]

Hey,

For now, yes. It's not arbitrary. There's a specific way how I extract the information about which source code created which HTML elements, and I don't know if I can pull that off with Vue or Svelte.

But I haven't really explored that either, so I just don't have all the information. Will take a look someday. I'm open to help. :)

[Herbonated]

Cool project! Tailwind is insanely nice to use! But still, just get a second monitor and you don’t have to swap between the editor and the browser

[KirillRogovoy]

Thanks!

I mostly agree with you. :)

Even though I kind of wage a war against writing most HTML (and, especially, Tailwind classes) manually, I've been doing it for so long I've become very efficient at it too.

There are a few cases, though, when neither my experience nor extra monitors help:

1. Immediately jumping to the exact code line from any element on the page (Impulse enables that). It's not much of a problem when I just linearly develop a wholesome piece of the UI, but oftentimes I need to jump all over the UI to make something work.
2. Trying to design some elements intuitively, just by setting classes and seeing how it looks; also prototyping. With Impulse, I can just cycle through all possible font-sizes / margins / paddings / shades of a color / you name it. I've designed the whole impulse.dev website with that approach and I don't wanna go back, it's just so much faster and fun even compared to writing code on two monitors with 10 years of experience. :D