

Mozilla Skywriter has been merged into Ace - abraham
http://mozillalabs.com/skywriter/2011/01/18/mozilla-skywriter-has-been-merged-into-ace/

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bobfunk
Most important change seems to be the switch from a canvas based renderer to a
DOM based renderer.

From what I've seen ACE feels a lot faster than Bespin did.

I've been wondering if it would be possible to build a WYSIWYG HTML editor on
top of their DOM based renderer ala Google Doc's editor. ContentEditable based
editors are a real pain to work with due to all the quirky browser behavior
that comes with contenteditable. Would be great to have an alternative...

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chime
Can this do code-collapse? I'd love to plugin the Ace editor like a textarea
and replace almost all of the JS at <https://zetabee.com/text> \- I see that
it supports hidden characters so maybe there is a way to hide entire chunks of
text (while preserving them during cut-copy-paste). Has anyone worked with
Ace? I tried customizing SkyWriter but it was more work than just rolling my
own JS.

The demo source <https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/blob/master/demo/startup.js>
is pretty clean but it doesn't appear if there is a way to extend the editor's
features via plugins.

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sharms
From the article, wrt extending:

"Along the way, we repackaged the plugin system as “pilot” and the command
line, which has become even smoother to use, is in its own package called
“cockpit“. You can use just these components in your own projects if you want
to make them extensible or keyboard-friendly."

~~~
chime
Thanks. I dug in and looks like it's still a non-JS system:
<https://github.com/mozilla/cockpit> \- I was hoping there'd be something like
a jQuery.fn.plugin system to hook on to the Ace editor and override specific
things.

~~~
dangoor
It's definitely all JS. There are hooks to plug in specific things, but not
any arbitrary behavior.

code folding is a nice feature though, and one I'd expect we'll see along the
way. code folding requires some work though, because it changes how line
positions are computed.

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jamesgeck0
I wonder how many people will realize that Ace is the new Skywriter. The last
name change was only in September.

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bokchoi
I wonder how this affects HP/Palm's Ares online editor for WebOS.

