
Web based Textmate like editor that saves to Dropbox - jkatka
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/iieeldjdihkpoapgipfkeoddjckopgjg
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stevejohnson
The only thing "Textmate-like" about this Chrome extension is that it has a
file list on the left and a tabbed editor on the right.

That said, this looks quite convenient, and I appreciate you bringing it to my
attention!

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ErrantX
Excellent.

Now drop in some version control (mercurial for my own preference :)) and we
are onto a winner.

Dropbox is great for syncing between your development machines, but version
control is essential for deployment and team development. Combining the two is
really powerful.

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sudont
Another "feature" would be the ability to use it without dropbox--save
functionality removed. I don't have my dropbox password handy, so the app is
completely unusable. (HTML"5" database/ javascript localstorage?)

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kenneth_chau
BTW, I'm the author of this software. So I've been trying to figure out how to
save things locally for awhile. I realized that HTML5 has a File System API
which in Chrome 9 can FINALLY write to the local SANDBOXED environment. This
feature is planned!!

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nrub
I started using CouchDB to save locally, or anywhere. It seems to be working
out well. What are your plans with the future of this ide?

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kenneth_chau
I plan to utilize the Dojo's data API as an abstraction layer on top of many
different kinds of drivers. I also have thought a bit about what sorts of
SERVER side integration this can have - with the potential of websockets, I
can see a RESTful git/hg server to be a next logical step!

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yafujifide
This is fantastic. This is exactly how I foresee the future documents and
editing. Dropbox, or something like that, provides the service of saving the
files. Then web apps are granted access to them and can edit them. Local
storage becomes a cache, and Dropbox is where the files are "really" stored.

The advantage of this, of course, is that all your stuff becomes device-
independent. Log in from any device that has web access, and you'll have
access to all your apps and all your files.

This is much better than having each web app manage files on their own. For
instance, you might have documents saved in Google Docs, notes saved in
Evernote and Catch.com, and emails saved somewhere else, etc. It sure would be
nice to have a single service provide the file storage so that you always have
all your stuff and don't have to worry about some web app going obsolete and
losing your data along with it.

Now what I would really like for backwards-compatibility is a web-based Linux
environment to access my files. Someone recently created a web app using the
HTML 5 canvas element (I think) to run an X GUI. (Anyone remember what this
was called and where it is located?) Attach a Linux system and that GUI
technology to your Dropbox, and then you have an entire computer that can be
accessed from any device. Either the browser itself would load all the files
and run them by emulation, or a server could run them natively and just print
the results to your browser. Either way, once that becomes possible, I would
be able to convert to an all-web environment.

~~~
zoomzoom
I think this might be what you are remembering - cool project.

<http://www.catonmat.net/blog/i-am-doing-a-startup>.

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joshuarr
This is really cool. I have absolutely no use for it.

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auston
My gf just got a Chrome OS notebook from Google - that is probably the best
use case for it.

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trobertson
That was my initial reaction to this too. But without a compiler/interpreter
on hand, this app won't be too useful for any serious coding. You just can't
test what you're writing.

On the other hand, this is fantastic for non-code text files.

~~~
nickpinkston
Maybe something like this could work?

<http://www.cloudcompiling.com/cloudcompilingsaas.html>

Wasn't there a link to a "Cloud Compiler" yesterday?

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heffay
So how is this web based? I have to install chrome and a plugin?

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JoelSutherland
This is awesome -- but badly needs some interface work. We've built a similar
tool for our CMS also on Bespin/Skywriter/Ace. Here is a screenshot:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/gethifi/4952045778/>

Little things like icons on the left are really helpful when trying to browse
a file structure. In any case, I'll likely be using this once and a while in a
pinch since I keep all of my client files in Dropbox.

I'm also excited for the Ace update. This appears to be using a pretty old
version. Rendering text in the DOM is much faster.

~~~
kenneth_chau
It looks like both of us are hitting something here. People seem to be VERY
enthusiastic about this. I am very excited to have pieced together some
amazing technologies.

Joel, I actually saw your app and thought that it was quite amazing looking
(it gave me hope in Ace actually!)

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jroes
Sweet. Now rip it out of Chrome and make it work on my phones and tablets!

This is probably best as a web app, not a browser plugin.

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mkilling
I hate being negative, but I really don't see the use case. I have a text
editor and Dropbox installed on my machine, why would I want to install this
editor?

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DanI-S
In the context of something like Chrome OS, stuff like this is vital to being
able to do meaningful development work. It's also pretty cool to have your
personal development environment, settings, etc. immediately accessible from
wherever you may be.

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siika2000
I still don't get it. I would love to use Dropbox but I can't install it
everywhere I go since the installation requires admin rights and I don't have
them at the university's computer for example. But I can use SSH and therefore
SCP from any computer without admin rights, so I really don't see what this
does except eliminate the need for a shell account, which are practically
free, heck even VPS's are beginning to be almost free nowadays.

~~~
DanI-S
I'm pretty sure you don't have to install Dropbox; the app is just using it as
local storage 'in the cloud'. It'd be nice if there were an interface to swap
it out for other things, like Microsoft, Google, EC2 or Rackspace storage.

Hmm - new project idea...

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DanI-S
I want this to interface to GitHub. That would be badass.

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mattmillr
Looks very promising, it'll be a good companion to the iPhone PlainText app.

Two suggestions: (1) Word-wrap. (2) Let me pick a dark-on-light color scheme.

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ffffruit
I only wish the real Textmate followed up on the huge list of todo's and
feature requests people have been submitting. I think a core update is long
overdue.

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askar
Can't agree with you enough! Do the developers of Textmate ever listen to
these demands?

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kenneth_chau
I personally hope the likes of SourceKit and Cloud9 IDE and such will someday
replace the likes of Textmate and Eclipse. It'll be a dream when you have VCS,
documentation, collaboration, IDE / text editor, running environments all be
accessible by everything (including your tablets!!)

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Timmy_C
What kind of syntax highlighting does this app support? I copy/pasted some
HTML with script and style tags and none of it got any sort of coloring.

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netghost
If anyone is curious about online editors, I recently wrote about Cloud9's Ace
Editor, IBM's Orion, and CodeMirror.

[http://endofline.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/3-browser-based-
ed...](http://endofline.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/3-browser-based-editors-to-
watch/)

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loevborg
This is very interesting. I realize I'm in the minority here, but I would love
to use something like this for editing English-language text such as articles,
letters, and so forth. This requires decent support for line-wrapping,
proportional fonts, and configurable line-spacing. I write my documents in
markdown and convert it to whatever is needed - ODT or LaTeX - using the
fantastic pandoc. I don't actually write a lot of code; I do write a lot of
articles.

I also really like vim keybindings, which makes my usecase even more exotic.
Web apps might make this niche interesting.

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kenneth_chau
SourceKit 0.6.2 is OUT! No more asking for email, pass; now with more Dojo and
Ace! <http://bit.ly/dRvLmb>

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navs
Nice find. Since this is a text editor, it would be nice to just display text
files.

PlainText, my favorite iOS app for note-taking, displays all files from a
specific folder within Dropbox. It may be limiting to others, having just have
one folder but it keeps things organized. I'd like to see this either support
that one folder model or alternatively, hide all content (images/video etc)
that don't apply to the editor.

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27182818284
I'm angry at myself for not thinking about the Dropbox portion of the
application. I had already thought that a TextMate-like editor for Chrome
would be really nice to have, but I couldn't think of a solution for. If I
used traditional saving methods, I couldn't figure out why I wouldn't just use
emacs, coda, textmate, etc. The Dropbox portion is what makes this app for me.

That

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kscaldef
I guess I still don't understand why I wouldn't just use emacs, etc. I edit
files in my Dropbox folder with emacs all the time.

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teach
At my workplace, the workstations are locked down so much that Dropbox can't
be installed. This might be a godsend for me.

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murrayb
I'm behind a corporate firewall where Chrome isn't allowed, any-one know of an
equivalent which will run on Firefox?

As an aside the Chrome Web Store tantalizingly says "Sorry, we don't support
your browser just yet. You'll need Google Chrome to install apps, extensions
and themes."- are they planning to go cross-browser at some point or just
teasing me?

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quinndupont
It looks handy, but upon realizing that it doesn't actually do very much
(beyond simple text editing), I discovered <http://kodingen.com> (has a Chrome
app, but really it just sends you to their website). It looks pretty amazing
and fully featured so far.

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euroclydon
Speaking of DropBox integration: I have the DropBox App on my iPhone, and the
1Password App too, which has "DropBox integration", but it asks for my DropBox
password. Is that the way it's supposed to work? Shouldn't 1Password be able
to access DropBox files via the phone itself?

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YooLi
I believe 1Password is just using the Dropbox API, in which case your
credentials are indeed needed. I don't think it's possible for 1Password to
use the Dropbox App to do the integration with the Dropbox service, at least
not at the present time with the way apps are sandboxed.

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Sephr
The Dropbox API doesn't require your credentials. Just use OAuth, so the only
party getting your credentials is Dropbox.

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dmd
Nice, but you're (egregiously) violating Dropbox API TOS by asking for the
user's password.

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kenneth_chau
Asking, but not storing.

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dmd
How about you tell me YOUR dropbox password? I promise I won't store it. I'm
just asking.

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jason_slack
Good start and on my CR-48 opens up some ways for me to develop on the road...

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kayoone
doesnt mozilla work on something similar ? <http://ace.ajax.org/>

it was previously called Bespin and is now part of a cloud based IDE as it
seems. Interesting.

~~~
dtran
It looks like SourceKit uses Bespin: _Embedded is the excellent Mozilla Bespin
(SkyWriter) text editor component_

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rmason
Got it installed but when I try to access the getting started guide I get
format not supported? I have no problem viewing web pdf's, even have Acrobat
Pro installed. So what's going on?

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lucraft
How does this work when Dropbox only allow mobile uses of their API?

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askar
The only thing I like about this is the code pane as it renders code decent
enough. Everything else is a bit unfinished work it looks like. Time to change
my Dropbox password then!

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ladon86
I thought it would only sync to a single folder on my Dropbox, but no, I can
edit any text file AND it has syntax highlighting.

Very neat and useful, thanks.

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podperson
Does it "undo" one keystroke at a time?

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kenneth_chau
I'm collecting these feedbacks and compiling some user stories for SourceKit.
Stay tuned!

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Sephr
Why would I ever give this extension my Dropbox credentials when Dropbox
supports OAuth?

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micah_moo
This is really cool, but I'm having some issues here, when I open up a
directory more than once the directory's that are in that folder duplicate,
like say a folder called css, I have a folder named img in it, if I re-open it
then it displays to img folders

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signa11
just a quick question here: why using your standard editor and saving stuff
onto the 'Dropbox' folder on the local-machine is not sufficient ?

~~~
kenneth_chau
I was inspired actually by the CR-48. As your JS engines get faster, these
sorts of software would be more relevant. I 1st PERSONAL milestone is to
develop this very software with itself rather than Textmate :)

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wslh
Right Click - Inspect Element? Please...

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BerislavLopac
Where is the Firefox version?

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bryanh
Awesome app, would be even more awesome decoupled into a true webapp.

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ebiester
It would indeed be awesome, except that dropbox still doesn't have a way to
sync with true webapps last I checked.

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da5e
This is very helpful for my CR-48.

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bowmande
Great work. Looks really nice.

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rokhayakebe
Ok, I would pay for this app.

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miniatureape
I would pay for a performant web-based text editor with vim bindings.

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wiredfool
s/vim/emacs/

(it had to happen.)

I tried it and keep hitting the basic emacs bindings on the keyboard, and
nothing happened.

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mkramlich
The problem of editing text files, synching them across many machines,
versioning them and sharing them via web or email is I think a well-solved
problem.

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natep
Even when one or more of the computers is a public machine (ex. in a library)?
This would have been great when I was in college and didn't always want to
carry my laptop around.

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giberson
I just created a dropbox account to test this out. Obviously there are no
existing files in it. I looked for a button to create a new file and could not
find one.

If dropbox does not have a create file call for you to use, perhaps you could
have the app create an empty filename and upload it automatically and then
edit it as an existing file?

Edit: Never mind, I finally noticed the buttons on the bottom left. That was
quite unintuitive for me--I never look at the bottom left for application
buttons. Is this something that textmate does?

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Timmy_C
There is a way to create new files and folders in the lower left-hand corner
if you pull out the tray on the left.

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wiredfool
I couldn't find it when I was looking. Should probably be a little more
obvious, at least early on.

