

Kod is a new Node.js scriptable code editor for OSX - tonyskn
http://kodapp.com/

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thomas11
I don't quite get how node.js comes into play here. I've seen lots of blog
posts about it, but never used it. It seems to be about network programming.
Indeed, the node website says "Node's goal is to provide an easy way to build
scalable network programs."

Would someone enlighten me what the motivation is to use it as an editor's
scripting environment?

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axod
node.js is a way to get people to click on an article. If it said "new editor"
no one would care. But the buzzword fashionable 'node.js' means people will
assume it's earth changingly awesome.

~~~
szopa
Comments like the parent make me sad. It could be summed up as "node.js, damn
hipsters." It's just another form of fanboyism, except negative.

There are not many good, scriptable editors for programmers. Actually, I would
consider only 3 for serious use: Emacs, Vim and TextMate. Of these, only one
has really good integration with OS X.

If I was considering switching editors, the language that is used to extend it
would be one of the most important factors (I love Emacs, but Emacs Lisp is
seriously broken). The fact that Kod uses node.js means two things:

1) It's JavaScript, so it's high level, has nice semantics and it's extremely
popular;

2) It uses a reasonably fast dialect of JS, and has the necessary
infrastructure, like CommonJS modules and access to the filesystem.

So, Node.js is the thing that makes this topic actually hacker-news-worthy.

~~~
axod
I don't really see the language used to script an editor as being _really_
important. But then I've never considered an editor as being that important.
As long as it works any will do.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't trying to beat this project down, I'm just
pointing out that 'node.js' carries a "wow it must be awesome" weighting at
the moment.

Give it a couple of years and node.js will be old and boring and there'll be a
new fashionable language everyone has to jump on.

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cincinnatus
I would have whole-heartedly agreed with you right up until a couple weeks
ago. Since then I've taken note of the wave of activity happening and really
dug in. There are a lot of issues still with Javascript and it's history, but
there are some compelling things happening and I think we need to start paying
attention and keep an open mind.

I suspect that next fashionable thing will be Go btw...

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KeithMajhor
This is a separate idea, but...

The "Chromium-like user interface where tabs can be torn off and moved between
windows" would be awesome if it were implemented directly in Mac OSX. Then
applications could drop all of that code and just let the OS deal with it.
Also, you'd be able to group distinct applications. I'd love to have a
[Browser, Text Editor, Terminal] tab group.

EDIT: Another thought... Chrome tabs don't look like any other tabs in Mac
OSX. Applications lose uniformity as they're forced to define more about
themselves.

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GeneralMaximus
Stack and Tile for Haiku is nice: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccniJHjo_Uw>

KWin in KDE can also stack and tile application windows. Sadly, nothing like
that exists for OS X.

~~~
rasmusfabbe
Have you tried Zooom/2? <http://coderage-software.com/zooom/>

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jrockway
Here's what I don't get about tabs and the phrase "programmer's text editor"
-- what programmer only has 8 files open at once?

Looking at ibuffer, I have 92 buffers open in Emacs right now. What would that
look like with tabs?

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gcr
My observations:

Most people in word have 1-2 documents open at once. Most people in text
editors like gedit, kate, eclipse, VS have maybe 10 or 20 tabs But most emacs
users have at least 80 or 90 buffers open! It's an interesting phenomena that
I haven't seen elsewhere. Why is this? Are tabs too much overhead or does
emacs have really good buffer management?

Not a criticism, I'm slowly picking up some emacs after 2 years of vi, and I'd
like to understand more of the nuances.

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szopa
It's because Emacs is one of the few editors where you can actually manage 90
and more buffers -- thanks to the fact that you can refer to them by name.

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julian37
Exactly. To switch to a different buffer I don't pick it from a list, I just
enter its name. Actually, thanks to iswitch, I only start typing a few
characters that are unique to the buffer name. It's an incredably fast way of
flicking between different buffers and it scales very well to a large number
of files.

Also, hippie-expand will expand to stuff contained in open buffers.

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itsnotvalid
How about cloud9 (<http://www.cloud9ide.com>), Bespin
(<https://bespin.mozillalabs.com/>), Codemirror (<http://codemirror.net/>) or
Ymacs (<http://www.ymacs.org/>).

It would be just lame to have another editor on just OSX only, considering
that most people have used some script-able code editor (like emacs or vim)
that are openly script-able (or compilable). If it is just for OSX, then there
is a specific scripting language called AppleScript which is OSX only and
should be even more integrated to the OSX APIs.

Well at least the "Chromium-like" part triggers my thoughts on web based
editor.

~~~
szopa
You've listed three browser based editors and one which seems to be completely
focused on JavaScript editing. If I understand correctly, Kod is supposed to
be a universal editor for programmers, only scripted in JS.

(But thanks for the link to cloud9, I didn't know about it and it looks
interesting.)

EDIT: meh, it was actually 4 browser based editors :(

~~~
itsnotvalid
Exactly, considering that we still have textmate around, I am not sure if
scripting in node.js with OSX API is the best way to pull it out.

As I mentioned AppleScript seems to be a better fit for an OSX-only editor.

Of course any new things are welcomed, just that I am not at the best positive
about this.

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micaelwidell
Finally some potential competition for textmate.

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dedward
I hear this more and more lately - and sure, competition would be good.. but,
what's wrong with textmate at this point?

I bought a few copies a few years ago, and I've been using them ever since,
lots of extensions, still nice and light, still awesome to use... I dont' find
myself sitting around thinking "Man I wish this guy would hurry up and bring
out a new version!".... like, it's not minecraft....

~~~
bradleyland
I'm a TM user, and I'm happy with the product, but there are some areas that
could use improvement. First, there's undo. Undo in TM is letter-by-letter.
That makes it pretty useless for moving very far back in to history. Then
there's any kind of intelligent auto-completion. Auto-complete in TM is as
rudimentary as it gets. It's basically word matching for the current document,
or from a bundle.

I still think TM is the best editor for me, and I'd happily use it for the
next 25 years without a single gripe if I had to, but I'm not sure the editor
community is going to just sit around while TM stagnates.

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frank06
Looks good. But I don't _really_ care if I can style the editor with CSS3.
Concretely, why should I scrap my current code editor and start using Kod? Is
it somehow targeted to Node.js devs; how is that better than Cloud9?

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technoweenie
I don't think it's a client-side in-browser editor:

"Written from scratch with modern OS X 10.6 APIs providing maximum OS
integration while avoiding reinvention of the wheel."

Though CSS styling and Node scripting leads me to believe it's using some
v8/browser stuff.

~~~
rasmusfabbe
No browser stuff and Node.js is running in an isolated process. CSS is simply
the "language" in which you define the looks of the editor and has nothing to
do with web browsers or html.

~~~
szopa
Are you the author of Kod (that's what some of your comments suggest)? If yes,
do you have a roadmap? Do you want to make it open source? I would be pretty
excited to try it, out even if it was in scary-alpha state.

~~~
Tobu
I stalked the website's author a little bit: \- rsms on Github, twitter,
flickr, facebook… \- <http://hunch.se/>

And this rasmusfabbe is developping Kod: \-
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHUp3sdKYJw> (a cool idea on grouping
documents by Levenstein distance)

I do wish people would get used to (dis)claiming when they have a stake in
some product they comment on.

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udp
Will it do C++? I still haven't found a _good_ C++ editor (with class member
autocomplete popups and such) - at least, nothing that compares to Visual
Studio over in the Windows world.

~~~
meastham
I've heard good things about this plugin, which uses clang to do
autocompletion inside vim:

<http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3302>

~~~
udp
That looks great - I'll give it a try. Thanks!

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rroar
Hey, does anybody know what font is used on that screenshot?

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samratjp
If they ported this to iPad, I'd pay big bucks for it.

~~~
zacharypinter
Agreed. An extendable (Apple allows JavaScript to be downloaded, right?) text
editor for the iPad would be wonderful.

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szopa
This is quite exciting. Anything is known about the authors or a release
schedule? I would love to beta test it.

~~~
asymmetric
about the author: <http://hunch.se/resume/>

tl;dr: was creative director at spotify, now works at facebook

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aboodman
I wonder if it is based on Chromium.

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rasmusfabbe
It's based on <https://github.com/rsms/chromium-tabs> which is a lose port +
mimic of Chromium code.

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adestefan
If it can't fix those curly braces in the screenshot then I don't want to go
near the thing.

~~~
cubicle67
not sure what you're referring to. If it's the font, well Im assuming that's
changeable and if it's the brace on line 47, then that's just word wrap making
it look odd. If you're referring to the fact that the open braces are on the
end of the lines, well... that's where God himself intended them to be :)

