
The World's Most Powerful Browser-Based IDE – Codio - aps-sids
https://codio.com/
======
reducer
It looks slick but it asks you to sign up before you can try it. For me this
is immediately offputting and I won't be bothering. All I wanted was to play
with it a little bit.

I'm especially interested in Javascript autocompletion but from docs it seems
comprehensive autocomplete is coming in the future [1].

[1]
[https://codio.com/s/docs/ide/autocomplete/](https://codio.com/s/docs/ide/autocomplete/)

~~~
__xtrimsky
agreed, I just decided not to try it because of the sign up.

I don't trust enough the company yet to just send some of my github details.

And then I'm just not ready to pay for an IDE, I work mostly from my home
office, I don't actually need to pay for an IDE, Netbeans works perfectly.

~~~
knodi123
> Netbeans works perfectly

That's an interesting point. As impressed as I am with codio's technology, I'm
wondering what the use-case is. People who need to do lots of dev, but on a
different laptop every day? Maybe developers who aren't allowed to go through
a US border check with a company laptop? (although such developers would be
unlikely to trust a cloud IDE, at that point...)

Weird.

~~~
joelmoss
There are a lot of advantages to coding in your browser. You mentioned just
one of them. But primarily it means you have no stack to install and
configure, as Codio Boxes provide all that for you. Also, you will find that
server development is much faster, as the connection between Codio Boxes and
the internet is much faster than that of your desktop.

Other advantages include collaboration, teaching/learning, and of course no
need to install or keep anything updated on your desktop - other than your
browser of course.

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rix0r
I've been thinking about this for a while:

What a good unique selling point for an online IDE would be, is automated
online testing--preferably with continuous integration.

I've been in the position enough times that I'd like to contribute some small
fix or feature to a project, only to be put off by the effort necessary to set
up a local development environment to make my 5-line change.

An online IDE could completely forego that: fork the code online, make my
change, automatically run all the tests (preferably instantly!) so I can check
I didn't break anything, and send a pull request!

~~~
josho
You suggestion makes complete sense. It would be a boon for public github
projects, but still something that folks probably wouldn't pay for.
Unfortunately, outside of your scenario I still don't see the value, ie. the
setup time it takes for a new employee to setup their dev. environment is a
tiny fraction of the time that they'll be spending working on the project.

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namityadav
I (barely) evaluated some cloud IDEs few weeks back and I felt Cloud9 and
Nitrous.IO were far superior to Codio or other IDEs. So, I'm wondering, what
makes you say Codio is the most powerful? In any case, I still don't see
enough value in cloud based IDEs to give up the speed that I get from
developing locally.

~~~
tarekmoz
I don't know if this is cultural, but I don't understand this kind of
marketing. It's like those signs in some restaurants, e.g. "the best
cappuccino in town" or "the world's best burger"...

It makes me instantly skeptical :)

~~~
joelmoss
Try it and see ;)

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cessor
I can't be the only one who gets annoyed by the following: I wish to try
services and tools, for example the disqus commenting function under some
blogs or the mentioned IDES. When I click on the "Signup with..." button for
an oauth access via twitter, facebook or, in this case github the software
will asks me to create a username, password or email address. Then what is the
point of oauthing in the first place? This leaves me baffled and angry and I
immediately lose interest.

~~~
joelmoss
The reason is that Github does not always pass on your email to us, and we
need to be able to contact you. Also, your Github username is not always
available on our system, so you have to verify or choose a different one, as
someone else may already be using it on our system.

~~~
cessor
Thank you for your clarification. Yet I wish more app creators would
understand how I feel about these things (others might think so too):

You don't ever need to contact me unless it is for confirming accounts, which
you don't have to, because I just oauth-handled you one. Username collisions
could be handled by suggesting mangled or decorated names but aren't really
the issue here. I am way more concerned about my email address.

It is not to be treated as a commodity and I hate the follow-up emails that I
immediately receive, each and every one of them.

I understand the concerns that cause this behavior and believe it can be quite
hard on today's market, so "hooking" in users by getting their email address
might seem necessary. Yet I feel strongly about the whole thing. I don't want
to give out email addresses and oauth is an appropriate way of handling
identity and access. Not only is asking for an address redundant but it's
encroaching. Maybe without this barrier you could improve the bounce rate.

------
boriskourt
I have used C9 and Nitrous (paid for both for a while) but I found that
compiling any JVM based language causes these to choke quite a bit. I tested
the free version of Codio right now and it started up the JVM + Compiler
faster than C9 and Nitrous. Alas that isn't saying much. Testing with a minute
ClojureScript project it still took 108.415 seconds for just the initial
warmup (which is largely the JVM)

I know these are low resource boxes, but none of the collaborative web IDEs
that I have tried even have an upgradeable package to get some more kick out
of the box. I am not excited to pay more, but if I can get regular Linux box
(even the five dollar digital ocean plan beats this out of the water time
wise) compile speeds I would finally be able to stick to using one of these.

I know I can ssh in and run the code on my own server, but that adds an extra
step with these IDEs.

Another reason is that I am trying to set up one of these services as a
teaching tool, allowing people to view the code live without collaborating
directly. C9 (and in some ways Nitrous) is fairly well equipped for this use
case, are there any plans for Codio to look into more robust support for a
many viewers -> single editor model?

~~~
grageth
Hey Boris, curious question here. If you could do an NFS mount to one of these
collaborative IDEs so that you could compile on another VM but still get the
collaboration of the IDE, would that be a nice compromise?

~~~
boriskourt
I think that this solution would work as long as I didn't have to re-init
everything each session. Some of the IDEs, not exclusive to free options, dump
the sessions fairly aggressively. (And it ends up being a new 'box' with only
the project files remaining consistent) Which makes sense, but not helpful in
my particular use case.

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mortov
Alas, using the latest Firefox 29 (downloaded yesterday) all I get in response
to 'Try Now' is :

Loading Codio, hold tight... Browser not supported!

 _Your browser is very old_ and will not work correctly with Codio. Please
upgrade to the latest version or use a modern browser

~~~
joelmoss
That is very strange, because I also use Firefox 29, and all works fine for
me. What OS are you on?

~~~
KhalPanda
Working fine for me, Ubuntu 14.04 / Firefox 29.

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duaneb
The editor has been written 1000x over. How are the refactoring tools?

~~~
CmonDev
Those are actually hard to implement. It's like programming languages:
everyone likes to design them, but nobody likes to implement the tools for
them.

~~~
duaneb
Exactly. "IDE" is tossed around as a glorified editor these days—whatever
happened to the integration with the languages beyond autosuggest and
coloration?

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vertex-four
I'm setting up Eclipse Orion[0] and Docker on my personal server at the
moment, so I can code from my Chromebook. I played around with it a bit on
OrionHub, and found it worked very well; an IDE for the browser and the web,
rather than a desktop IDE shoehorned into HTML5.

Together with some form of automatic deployment system into my server, this
should work fairly well for development, hopefully.

[0] [http://www.eclipse.org/orion/](http://www.eclipse.org/orion/)

~~~
joelmoss
You could do that, but if you use Codio, all you need is your browser. Nothing
else! It provides the server and code editor.

~~~
dman
What about an internet connection?

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mark_l_watson
I have not used Codio (yet), but that is a bold claim.

Google's internal web based IDE is awesome, as is the Haskell FPComplete.com
IDE. Good luck competing with these IDEs.

I have used Nitrous.io for Meteor.js, and it is also pretty good.

~~~
coldtea
> _Google 's internal web based IDE is awesome, as is the Haskell
> FPComplete.com IDE. Good luck competing with these IDEs._

Well, if it's "internal" it's no competition, and if it's for Haskell, again
it's not much of a competition either.

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cypher543
Please disable autoplay on that video. Some of us have heavily-capped internet
connections and can't afford to have an HD video buffer in the background.

~~~
endianswap
Even without autoplay enabled, many sites are setting the preload attribute
which is a much less visible way to consume extra bandwidth. If this is a real
concern for you I'd suggest an extension to block Flash and HTML5 video tags.

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dang
This is a duplicate of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6689759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6689759).

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JasonFruit
So in what meaningful sense does this support Pascal? It seems like the IDE's
(not necessarily the box) support for Pascal is on only a slightly higher
level than Notepad. There's very basic syntax highlighting, and non-syntax-
aware autocompletion based on the current file. You even have to manually
handle indentation, and to drop back a level, you have to delete the right
number of spaces, one at a time.

You can't be an IDE until you're at least a usable editor.

~~~
joelmoss
There are a lot of programming languages to support, so please bear with us.
But we're making good progress. What other languages do you use?

~~~
JasonFruit
A number of them, but Pascal is a rare enough inclusion to have made me try it
out — only to find that it shouldn't have been included in the list of
supported languages, because it's not. Better to list fewer features but
implement them well, in my opinion.

~~~
joelmoss
I understand where you are coming from, but its difficult to decide when such
a feature becomes a feature. We have syntax highlighting for Pascal, so you
could argue that we support it, but of course, there is a lot more that we
could do to make Pascal devs lives easier and more fruitful.

~~~
leeoniya
quite a strange take, IMO. i guess you could just as easily claim "Support for
over 60 languages out of the box" by integrating Codemirror [1], though i
would consider this to be quite disingenuous.

without singing up, it's hard to say how much is there, but autocomplete, some
form of function & class list and a syntax checker / linter would be a minimum
to claim any form of language support in the context of an IDE.

my 0.02

[1]
[http://codemirror.net/mode/index.html](http://codemirror.net/mode/index.html)

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RankingMember
Personal UI Nitpick: Hovering over the titlebar items doesn't cause them to
automatically drop down like I'd expect.

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aoverton
Just wanted to comment to add that your AutoComplete video under Features is
missing.

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michaelbuddy
cough, er herm -- codiad, codebox, icecoder..

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caycep
it's not "cod.io"?

~~~
jimhart3000
Nope, that one's taken by a new app that's disrupting the fishmonger industry.

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notastartup
I don't see how this can be useful to me, compared to a desktop IDE +
digitalocean $5 vps. Why pay more for something I already have full access to?
I can see that this is a browser side IDE but there have been other's in this
area like cloude 9, which I've used but ended up using desktop IDE because it
was so frustrating to deal with.

~~~
josho
I couldn't agree more. Well, almost. I'm still not convinced of the value of a
$5 vps, is that primarily to have a production like test environment?

Generalizing this, I have 16gb RAM, an SSD, and a plenty of CPU horsepower.
What benefit does running my development work in the cloud provide? In the
past folks argued that it simplify's environment setup, but for that we have
things like chef or ansible. __So, someone please how do browser based editors
make my life better? __

