

Ask YC: Online Text Editors. - izak30

Ok, I've been looking for an online text(code) editor.<p>For WYSIWIG there are many options, and a few leading free ones, but I can't find anything in the Code Editing realm.<p>Preferably it'd be open source, secondly; if not, something that I can host/integrate and not a hosted thing.<p>I know you have apps doing on-demand code running etc around here, so surely somebody else is using something similliar to this.<p>Thanks
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sah
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Javascript-
based_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Javascript-
based_source_code_editors)

EditArea has a lot of features and works well, if it displays properly in your
browser: <http://www.cdolivet.net/editarea/>

CodePress does pretty well in FireFox: <http://codepress.org/>

I think CodeMirror has the most potential -- I like the parser design in
particular: <http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/codemirror/>

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wenbert
are you looking for something like this? <http://www.cdolivet.net/editarea/>

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izak30
YES. If I could give you another point for this I would. It's been
ridiculously hard to find something that is matureish in this area.

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dfranke
Just curious, why do you want one? It seems to me that a code editor is almost
uniquely unsuited to be a web app. You need to keep your data locally anyhow,
unless your whole toolchain is a web service. Furthermore, my editor is a tool
I want absolute control over: I don't want its behavior changing unexpectedly
when a new update is released.

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mechanical_fish
The closer the average textfield's behavior could be to that of emacs, the
happier I would be.

Mac OS X supports a decent batch of emacs-style keybindings -- C-a and C-e
work, C-k and C-y work, the cursor-movement keys work. Give me C-s and C-r and
I would be even happier, though. Or C-x C-w to write half-written drafts of
news.yc posts to files for backup. Or C-x C-i to import text from files on
disk. The list goes on and on.

I type an unfortunate amount of text into browser fields during the course of
a day. It would be nice to be able to make these fields work more like a
decent editor, and by that I don't mean TinyMCE.

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dehowell
If you're a Firefox user, check out the "It's All Text!" extension. It lets
you edit any text area in the external editor of your choice. For instance,
I'm composing this comment in vim.

The download page at mozilla.com claims that it's hard to get working on Mac
OS X, but that's actually not true. Skim through the comments... someone
explains how do to it.

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mechanical_fish
Thanks, this is just the kind of comment I was fishing for!

I was scared off by the claims that the OS X install was tricky. That and the
fact that I don't use Firefox for anything but Firebug at the moment... I find
Safari to be more stable and faster. This might tempt me to switch back to the
Fox, though.

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tlrobinson
Not sure how easy this is to integrate, but this is an interesting read about
implementing a continuation based syntax highlighter in JavaScript.

<http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/codemirror/story.html>

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raju
Here is one amy-editor (<http://www.april-child.com/amy/amy.php>). If you are
doing ruby on rails, Heroku also has an online editor built.

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aaroniba
appjet.com has an editor (written in javascript, for javascript)

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maryrosecook
Not sure if this will do, but you if you're on OS X you can use TextMate's
'Edit In TextMate' to edit code in any text field in any web browser.

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thomas
tinyMCE is the big one, there is also FCKeditor .

list: <http://geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/WebEditors>

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izak30
Yeah, those are WYSIWIG, I'm looking for Code editors. (like textmate, EMacs,
etc

