

Ymacs - An Emacs-like editor for the web - jefffoster
http://www.ymacs.org/

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bensummers
Well that's impressive stuff! Especially as it doesn't use designMode or the
like.

I too have had 'fun' with text editing in browsers. And I need to revisit it
at some point. :-(

Here's an experiment of mine: <http://www.fluffy.co.uk/stediting/> \-- very
proof of concept, only left+right keyboard navigation works so far. However,
it does show that proportionally spaced text is possible with this kind of
technique. Using monospaced fonts, like Ymacs does, is cheating.

I was going to do make something which would sort this out once and for all:
<http://code.google.com/p/editable-framework-js/> but as is the way with many
an open source project, it didn't get much further than thinking about the
design.

I found this linked from the Ymacs site
<http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/codemirror/story.html> which is a nice explanation
about why using designMode is a nightmare.

~~~
mishoo
> Using monospaced fonts, like Ymacs does, is cheating.

It was cheating, initially, but now it supports variable-width fonts as well,
as you can see by selecting some other font from the menu (right-side). Of
course, some serious hacks were needed. ;-)

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mahmud
Win32 firefox is hijacking the Control key.

Impressive web app. It's written with the author's own javascript library
<http://www.dynarchlib.com/> which is both beautiful and extensive.

~~~
Pistos2
DynarchLIB documentation seems to be quite comprehensive:
<http://www.dynarchlib.com/dl/index.html>

------
alien_acorn
On a related but completely different note, if you are looking for Emacs key
bindings in Firefox, try Firemacs:

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4141>

------
lele
Another "Emacs-like editor" which misses the point. The "Emacs experience" is
not about keybindings, but about an interactive and fully customizable
environment. Nonetheless, great work.

~~~
almost
It is written in JS and it looks like that JS can be edited in the editor and
reloaded on the fly. That's the core of Emacs I think, being able to recode
the editor on the fly.

I haven't actually tried that with YMacs so I don't know how well it would
work. But I could see something like this forming the basis of an actual
serious editor. The one thing I feel is missing from Emacs is a decent display
engine. Of course that's not a new idea.

EDIT: I just fact checked my comment and it turns out that you can't just
reload code into a running YMacs. If that were supported then I think it would
be fair to call it an "Emacs like editor" or even just an "Emacs".

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ramchip
"Load it's own code". I guess it's my inner grammar nazi, but things like this
at such a prominent position in an app make me cringe.

Surprisingly snappy and pleasant to use though. Does not work perfectly on
Opera, but still more than I expected.

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limmeau
Nice.

However, on my Opera10.10/Linux, '(' seems to do the same as Shift-Down, and
'.' deletes. Strange...

~~~
mcav
Same here, Safari4/Mac.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I'm afraid you may need to pay close attention to the first paragraph. The one
where the guy says that it only works in Firefox. By which he means "Firefox".

Given the ambition of this hack, I'm not surprised that he's not rushing to
make it work cross-browser...

~~~
mcav
Ah, point taken. I guess I was too interested in the editor itself to bother
reading the whole page first.

~~~
limmeau
I, too, plead guilty of not reading the text before trying the demo. I mean,
if there's a demo, why bother reading?

See also "Treating user myopia" on Coding Horror.
<http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001306.html>

------
c00p3r
Isn't there any projects to build a hosted gnu emacs? Like an ajax+canvas
interface and a thing a-la mod_emacs on a server side. =)

~~~
paddy_m
I guess I could hack something up with rxvt-js , I don't really think it would
be that useful. Would you use it?

