ElectronIM
All-in-One Messenger that doesn’t kill your laptop batteries
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If you have been following for a while, you would know that I have been on a never ending quest to find an effective all-in-one messenger that’s separate from my main browser for quite some time now since my day-to-day work requires me to be on a bunch of different communication platforms to collaborate with their teams.
After trying more solutions than I would have liked to, I have in the past narrowed down to Sidekick and Ferdium which Sidekick is closed source and also requires you to signup for an account to continue using it after a period of time. Needless to say, “having to sign-up” quickly gave a bad taste in my mouth when I found out. On top of that, there were some minor annoyances of sidekick that drew the line for me and got me back to using Ferdium pretty quickly. However, Ferdium and Sidekick both are pretty resource consumption heavy and I have noticed a huge difference in my battery life when I had either one of them running all the time. This is to be expected though given that my CPU idle seems to be hovering around 15% — 20-ish% when Ferdium is running but it’s only 4–9% variably when it’s not. Yet, Ferdium is already the less rosource hungry alternative.
A few days ago, as I was checking for alternatives again, I stumbled across a pretty actively maintained project called, ElectronIM. While it’s not as full featured as Sidekick and Ferdium, I noticed that my CPU idle has not changed with ElectronIM running. I am wondering if it’s because ElectronIM uses Chromium instead of Webkit but either way, not only does it not increase my CPU idle, I also keep getting timely notifications as new messages arrive pretty reliably.
So if you have the same requirements as me where you don’t care as much about fancy features as you do having a simple tabbed list of communication platforms quietly opened in the background all the while not killing your laptop battery, you will probably want to check it out too. Here’s a link to the Github page:
There are some minor bugs and limitations with ElectronIM but as it stands, I intend to participate where I can in hopes of keeping ElectronIM in this pretty integral part of my workflow for the foreseeable future.
