Announcing npmx: a fast, modern browser for the npm registry

13 points by outervale

Maybe this is just me getting old, but these acronyms are getting out of hand. npm, pnpm, npx, npnx, npmx... Getting hard to keep track which does what.

strongly-typed

Sounds like the opportunity is ripe to make a new tool called pnpmnx to unify them all under a single interface.
altano

What’s npnx?

I agree though I actually had trouble remembering npmx the other day when trying to type it in the browser, heh.

Just be grateful there’s no pnpmx?
- SoapDog
  
  someone will vibecode pnpmx before this post leave the front page of lobsters...
kraxen72

https://github.com/antfu-collective/ni

colonelpanic

JS tools have a particular problem with declaring this or that project as "modern" but never actually defining the meaning of modernity. It's become just a nonsense word used to denigrate alternatives without bothering to make a case for why you should use the new tool.

bmh

I think this along with “lightweight” is endemic of describing software in general. Though JS projects have a propensity of overusing these descriptors.
- doctor_eval
  
  Don’t forget “blazing fast”.
  - colonelpanic
    
    While vague, descriptions like "lightweight" and "blazing fast" are making comprehensible claims. Lightweight means lower resource utilization of some sort, like memory or CPU. Blazing fast means execution time. I can tell from that specifically how the software is meant to be better than its predecessor.
  - WilhelmVonWeiner
    
    If I read "blazing fast" I lose all interest in a project and close the tab.
- altano
  
  npm’s registry search is so old and lacking in features that if you’ve ever used it and then used npmx for 12 seconds, I think you’d agree npmx is more modern, whatever that means.
  - colonelpanic
    
    Why is "old" perjorative, here? What features are lacking? What is the connection between age and feature set? Why is this alternative better, and do we have reason to believe it won't suffer the same fate over time? What are the different tradeoffs being made that made this better/faster than the old one?
    
    These are the basic questions that should be answered.
- conartist6
  
  I used it for about 15 seconds interacting with the search box heavily and then it locked up completely in an infinite loop and was never heard from again
- mdaniel
  
  neato https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=@kubernetes/client-node@1.4.0
  
  and they also do "This will run a pnpm install inside your browser with WebContainer" via https://node-modules.dev/grid/depth#install=@kubernetes/client-node@1.4.0 although I don't this second know why that is but it does seem to be the fastest way to get a catalog of the licenses across all of the deps of a package