
Stackblitz – Online VS Code Editor for Angular and React - uptown
https://stackblitz.com/
======
ericmsimons
Creator here — thanks for posting our project! For more info, check out my
Medium announcement post here: [https://medium.com/@ericsimons/stackblitz-
online-vs-code-ide...](https://medium.com/@ericsimons/stackblitz-online-vs-
code-ide-for-angular-react-7d09348497f4) :)

Happy to answer any q's & would love to hear your feedback!

~~~
fgblanch
Is it actually a modified version of VScode (As sourcegraph does) or are you
just using the Monaco editor? As some mentioned in other comments i would also
be insterested in running vscode frontend in the browser while havinf the
backend in a VPS. Thanks and congrats on the project it's great!

~~~
Hydraulix989
Yes, that's one use case (desktop/web interop) where using something
Electron.JS might actually make sense (to the extreme detriment of battery
life, memory usage, and CPU usage).

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drej
This looks really cool, just one quick question - I'm not really interested in
all that Angular/React stuff, I just want my favourite VS Code in the browser
(as a 'thin' client between my browser and my VPS, for example). Is this thing
modular to allow for this, or is this meant to be just an Angular/React tool?
Thanks!

~~~
ericmsimons
Thanks! And great question — I don't think we're not targeting that sort of
use case unfortunately, but we will allow you to do full git in browser pretty
soon here. Right now we only support React & Angular but we're opening up
custom templates that will let you configure any loaders, compilers, etc :)

~~~
betageek
It would be nice to be able to launch it with a blank template as it seems to
be flexible enough to work with anything that doesn't need config e.g. Vue
([https://stackblitz.com/edit/react-
ng1kyn?file=index.js](https://stackblitz.com/edit/react-ng1kyn?file=index.js))

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krat0sprakhar
This looks really really well done! Ideal for trying out components and
sharing demos.

Your medium post mentions

> These are the two key technologies that really enabled us to pack all of the
> functionality inside of your web browser with virtually no server-side
> involvement.

Can you elaborate a bit about how this is achieved?

Thanks and congrats for the launch!

~~~
ericmsimons
Thanks for the kind words! And absolutely, take a peek at this GH thread about
it: [https://github.com/unpkg/unpkg-
website/issues/35#issuecommen...](https://github.com/unpkg/unpkg-
website/issues/35#issuecomment-317128917)

~~~
filearts
Creator of [https://plnkr.co](https://plnkr.co) here. Amazing work on
StackBlitz. Looking forward to figuring out how it all hangs together. Very
novel approach indeed.

Anecdotally, I was the one who contributed ?json support to unpkg for a
related use-case (in browser editor). OSS at its best, moving everyone
forward. I use use the feature to provide a similar (but more limited) package
injection. Check out
[https://next.plnkr.co/edit/](https://next.plnkr.co/edit/) (book icon in
toolbar of html panes) to see it in action.

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brooklyntribe
Once went vuejs, mind blown how good it is. Any word on vuejs support?

~~~
ericmsimons
Vue support should be landing in either late Aug or early Sept :)

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karllager
One thing that made me smile on [https://stackblitz.com/edit/ball-
demo](https://stackblitz.com/edit/ball-demo):

The dependency placeholder. Funny for those who remember, useful for those who
don't.

~~~
ericmsimons
I'm glad you caught that :)

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moosingin3space
The performance here was quite good! I'm impressed.

~~~
ericmsimons
Thanks! We spent a _ton_ of time nailing down perf to ensure it ran fast even
on lower end CPU's :)

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afshinmeh
Very nice! good job. Looks really similar to
[https://github.com/CompuIves/codesandbox-
client](https://github.com/CompuIves/codesandbox-client) though.

And this is the online editor:
[https://codesandbox.io/s/new](https://codesandbox.io/s/new)

~~~
ericmsimons
We started StackBlitz long before CodeSandbox was released:
[https://medium.com/@ericsimons/our-goal-was-to-port-vs-
code-...](https://medium.com/@ericsimons/our-goal-was-to-port-vs-code-npm-and-
webpack-loaders-to-run-entirely-in-your-browser-and-still-8751f39e5b0f)

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peternicky
This is AWESOME!! Great work. I noticed that the GitHub repo is missing source
code; when do you plan on releasing it?

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royka118
Yeah like the look of this, makes me wonder if one day I can code on a
chromebook

~~~
headmelted
Not to hijack, but I've written directly on this topic in case it's useful:

[https://headmelted.com/coding-on-a-
chromebook-84335cce96c8](https://headmelted.com/coding-on-a-
chromebook-84335cce96c8)

There are options around (including my own scripts at
[https://code.headmelted.com](https://code.headmelted.com)) and the situation
is advancing steadily in terms of the tools available.

~~~
royka118
Looks good, I'd like to try this though
[https://blog.lessonslearned.org/building-a-more-secure-
devel...](https://blog.lessonslearned.org/building-a-more-secure-development-
chromebook/)

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jonny_eh
Very nice, seems quite similar to
[https://codesandbox.io](https://codesandbox.io)

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akuji1993
Apparently it doesn't have Sass Support which kind of makes it not viable for
me. Otherwise pretty great for hacking up small projects when you don't want
to setup your whole environment yourself.

~~~
ericmsimons
Sass support is landing late Aug or early Sept :)

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nachoab
Congrats! it looks really good. Can you tell me how do you compute the
package.json tree on your servers before requesting unpkg? Also, are you using
AWS Lambda's?

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watty
This is insanely cool. Having worked with SystemJS + JSPM dependency hell in a
large project I can't imagine making it all work this seamlessly in a browser.

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nikkwong
This looks great, but why is it better than say, plnkr? Other than the tooling
and some features like offline use etc. It's essentially the same yeah?

~~~
ericmsimons
I think our announcement posts covers this well:
[https://medium.com/@ericsimons/stackblitz-online-vs-code-
ide...](https://medium.com/@ericsimons/stackblitz-online-vs-code-ide-for-
angular-react-7d09348497f4)

tl;dr — we're trying to create the first _fully in-browser IDE_ , not a
playground :)

~~~
skrebbel
The first? c9.io has been around for ages, right.

~~~
ericmsimons
When I say _in browser_ I mean that the _browser itself_ is compiling,
bundling, hot reloading, & serving the app — it's not using any resources on a
VM somewhere in the cloud.

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hamburglar1
Looks great, is there any way to add VS Code extensions / configure the build
process (linting, testing etc...) / Is that on the roadmap?

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devdad
On mobile: If I try to uncomment by hitting backspace on phone keyboard,
instead of erasing it duplicates the word left to the marker. :)

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tdevito
Has anyone tried setting up angularfire2 or firebase in a project yet?

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jadk157
This is v cool! Nice job

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sunilkumarc
Are there plans to add react-native?

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onion2k
There's a decent IDE-in-a-browser for React Native at
[https://snack.expo.io/](https://snack.expo.io/)

~~~
sunilkumarc
Neat!

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ToFab123
Is there Source Control integration?

~~~
ericmsimons
Not yet, but that's absolutely on the near-term roadmap!

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idibidiart
Ember 2 is dead? I don't use Ember or Ember 2 and never have but curious why
it's not part of the supported frameworks. Same for Vue. Feels like people who
make tools are opting to support the frameworks currently most popular. What
happens if they fall out of favor in a couple of years?

~~~
kalcode
What about putting the effort to support Vue or Ember? What happens if they
fall out too?

They never suggested those frameworks are dead or inferior. They just made a
product and launched it.

I mean I imagine adding support for each framework takes a lot of work and if
the audience is too small then they might feel the time was better spent
making the current three frameworks work well.

This is the idea of mvp right?

They just released it. Should they have waited until they had X framework that
Y person feels they are missing? Maybe 50 frameworks added later they can
release it and you'd be happy at that point?

Seems like more negative with nothing really added.

I thought HN had more quality comments but i've been seeing these kind of low-
effort comments that are mostly negative that seem more about complaining then
being constructive. I hope you can understand where I am coming from and I
hope if you enjoyed their product they are considering adding support for a
framework you enjoy.

------
easonchan42
test

~~~
minihack
Creator here — thanks for posting our project! For more info, check out my
Medium announcement post here: [https://medium.com/@ericsimons/stackblitz-
online-vs-code-ide...](https://medium.com/@ericsimons/stackblitz-online-vs-
code-ide..). :)

~~~
atoko
Your blog post 404s for me :(

That aside, it astonished me how quickly intellisense popped up. This is
great.

I believe Microsoft hosts a similar app iirc

