My specific desire for a nw.js replacement is 1. cross-platform, like nw.js itself; 2. something visually distinctive that I can use without having my web browser's Everything on display; and 3. ideally, I can hit "refresh" and it'll reopen, like the Internet Explorer-bound MSHTA, but this isn't a deal-breaker. (For reasons which I hope are apparent, I am dropping the Internet Explorer-bound MSHTA in favor of, well, this whole situation.) My particular use-case is just a quick UI which does some simple string-manipulations with buttons, also one "ask if I want to run a BAT file via normal OS operations and then close" thing and one "read from a remote website's API and return what it says".
nw.js has a bit of jank -- you can only open one instance of each "app", and sometimes it hangs instead of closing all the way when I close the window, which is not a good combination. On the bright side, the second of those is mitigated by a third annoyance on Windows, namely that I can't figure out how to start nw.js without having a command-line window open behind it, and I can easily terminate it by closing the command-line window. nw.js is also kind of slow, sometimes taking a few seconds to open; MSHTA is near-instantaneous, as is opening a new browser window when the browser is already open.
Soooo basically that's the situation I'm in right now!
