

The Best Way to Help Programmers - mattpardee
https://c9.io/site/blog/2012/11/the-best-way-to-help-programmers/

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Permit
I think they've done a very excellent job with Cloud9 and I've signed up to
play around with it some more.

However, the problem to me seems that in order to reap the benefits of Cloud9
one has to give up the benefits of their current IDE. It will undoubtedly be
the same situation for LightTable when they release.

I want collaborative editing in my IDE. If I'm using Visual Studio and my
colleague is using SublimeText, I want to be able to work collaboratively with
him/her. I've wondered if some sort of protocol could be created by which
other developers could create plugins for popular IDEs that might allow cross-
IDE collaboration.

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atldev
Wow...I'm impressed. I just spent a few minutes setting up an account and I
was blown away by your execution on the editor alone. I haven't even tried
using the other features yet. The screenshots made it look very similar to
SublimeText2 and I wondered how smooth it would be. Vim mode, zen mode, even
the find options were very similar. I was able to do everything I expected to
do, even down to getting the theme just right.

It's the first time I thought I could use a web-based editor. That's a big
deal. Well done!

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gjtorikian
Thanks for the kind words! We try really hard to make the concept of an online
IDE move beyond just editing and saving files in a browser.

Best of all, unlike ST2, we're open source:
<https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9>

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ronyeh
This is very slick. I especially love how the themes (View > Themes) update as
you hover over them! It's a great way to preview your the color settings for
your editor. I wish more UIs had this sort of live preview.

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lopatin
_“In the year 2000… you will be able to instantly replicate your colleague’s
dev environment on your own computer.”_

Non issue, most companies use VMs for their dev environments for this reason
among others.

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k3n
That's a novel approach, but where does the IDE live, within the VM? Seems
like performance would really suck with that setup, but perhaps I don't
understand what all you have on the VM and what you have on the host OS.

At my company, we give developers several days (up to a week at times) to get
everything downloaded, installed, setup, configured, etc. It's a huge drain
but then again, you should've seen it 2-3 years ago, at which point the only
avoidance of duplicated efforts was by virtue of having a single portable HD
which held all of our databases [for use in testing]. The data was 5 years old
at the time...

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lopatin
To just set everything up, several days to a week sounds extreme to me. The VM
should hold the code, framework, db, etc.. It's basically a clone of the
production environment that lives inside a VM on my host machine. It has a
shared folder with my host machine which holds the code. I use an IDE on my
local machine to edit this code, which the VM runs. No reason to put the IDE
into the VM. This achieves perfect separation and has a total of a few hours
setup time for most projects. Literally no duplication of efforts (except
setting up the VM its self).

