

Ask HN: Web-based coding text editors? (for coding on the cr48) - jaxn

All of this talk about the new Chrome notebook has me thinking about moving coding to the cloud.<p>Almost all of the coding I do now is stuff that is hosted at github. I don't see any reason that couldn't be done in a browser. It looks like Mozilla has a project targeted at this (https://mozillalabs.com/skywriter/ formerly Bespin).<p>Are there any others? Are any HNers coding this way already? And yes, I know that vi/emacs + ssh is viable, but that is not the topic ;)
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AntiRush
Cloud9 IDE (<http://www.cloud9ide.com/>) is a neat looking project. It's
Javascript-centric right now but I believe it will be more generally useful.

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clyfe
This project is pretty active on github

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gaoshan
I've never used github so this is my first foray into using it and it is down!
Does that happen often with github? I've been unable to clone from it (or even
connect to the website) for a few hours now.

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IdeaHamster
This seems like a promising implementation of Vi in Javascript:
<http://gpl.internetconnection.net/vi/>

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hasenj
Nice, but heads up: it doesn't play nice with Vimium (chrome extension).

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wwortiz
If it was done in a similar way to vimperator there should be a passthrough
mode (ctrl-z in vimperator)

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rbxbx
In vimium you can press 'i' to go into 'insert mode (sort of)' which works
similarly (albeit not as well as) vimperator's passthrough mode.

Adding the exclusion is probably the best route though.

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bretthoerner
This is what I do on mine,

Control + Alt + T; ssh user host; emacs -nw

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jaxn
Yes, as I said in the initial post, I know that is possible, but it misses the
point. This requires a host that you want to develop on and as I move more to
the cloud (i.e. hosting on Heroku), I am less likely to have a server to SSH
into.

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loire280
It's worth having a VPS around as your dev environment. The laptop you're
carrying around is extremely likely to get lost, stolen, dropped, or otherwise
damaged. A VPS isn't a backup solution, but it's not at constant risk of
physical harm.

Work in a screen session and you'll be able to pick up where you last left off
--from any machine. Not to mention your VPS is almost certainly faster than
your laptop and connected to a bigger pipe than whatever wifi you're
borrowing, so downloading a .tar.gz or a git clone will be fast, and compiling
won't eat up your battery life.

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loire280
It's probably worth plugging <http://prgmr.com/xen/>, run by fellow HN member
lsc. If you prepay for the year, a 256MB VPS is only $6.40/mo. I've had good
luck with it so far; it's a perfect always-on dev environment.

(I'm just a customer, no affiliation)

Edit: looks like they're not accepting new customers right now. sorry.

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kamme
They where having some issues with their billing pages it said for some time.
You can always email them and ask to keep you updated when you can place an
order again. Even tough they seem to cut costs by not having a regular
helpdesk, they are very fast responders and seem to know their bussiness very
well.

I'm a new customer of their service and very happy with the price/quality, but
you do have to have a technical background.

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grandalf
<http://www.ymacs.org/>

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duncanj
Unfortunately, Chrome OS seems to trap C-n before it makes it to the browser.

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bobds
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_JavaScript-
based_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_JavaScript-
based_source_code_editors)

I'm always amazed at what can be found on wikipedia.

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Groxx
Indeed, though those comparison pages tend to be _very_ out of date and
missing major players while including ones that existed for months at the
most.

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shaunxcode
I saw <http:///www.coderun.com> posted here the other day.

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jaxn
All of the images on that page are broken (in Safari). That doesn't exactly
instill confidence.

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ihodes
You sure? <http://cl.ly/3a5v>

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jaxn
whoa. Weirdness.

The clickable link above has three slashes after http instead of two. Somehow
this results in a link to http:/www.coderun.com (one slash) which results in
broken images in my safari: <http://grab.by/7PQT>

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melvinram
Heroku had launched initially with an online code editor though they phased it
out. Not sure if it's available online anywhere now days.

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jaxn
That would be particularly cool if Heroku added a "staging environment" to
test the code prior to deployment.

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jscheel
I haven't used skywriter, since it was bespin, but I was impressed with the
progress at the time. <http://kodingen.com/> looks pretty nice though.

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jeffclark
I wish Kodingen was a little more focused on development and less on the
"social" stuff. It has such amazing potential.

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nir
I have a working (but far from perfect) App Engine based one here:
<http://qkhack.appspot.com/>

Only Firefox for now, due to the editor UI. If you'd like to help integrate
Skywriter/Bespin, I'd love to collaborate. The code is here:
<https://github.com/niryariv/weblets>

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kat
<http://jsfiddle.net/>

Its not a complete IDE, but its a nice web dev sandbox.

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fjabre
I wrote about this a while back: [http://teabuzzed.com/2009/09/its-time-the-
case-for-a-browser...](http://teabuzzed.com/2009/09/its-time-the-case-for-a-
browser-based-ide-from-google/)

It still baffles me that Google hasn't tackled this already.

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vanstee
<http://kodingen.com/> is alright.

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jackolas
What I see as a bonus here is that it offers multiple editors, that'd be
useful if I wanted to use them on my phone and on a full machine too.

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slug
<http://mbed.org/> has a full ide for embedded C programming.

It's as easy as writing your code (in your browser), launch the compilation
process in their systems (cloud) and automatically downloading the resulting
binary file, which can be easily transfered to the device by drag&drop, since
it's recognized as a usb storage device.

I got mine for free a while back and it took me few minutes to develop a
simple multi-threaded application to control a few LEDs and Servos.

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James_Law
Hi - we're working on <http://buildorpro.com> which is focused on html/css
markup as opposed the more codey focused IDEs.

It gives you a great mix of html/css editors with a Coda/Espresso style CSS
design tools and a bunch of other advantages that developing in the browser
brings you.

The beta's there for sign up if you fancy giving it a spin.

PS - FireFox only at the mo. but Chrome support is hot on its heels.

James Law @ Buildor

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clyfe
Executable pasties: <http://codepad.org/>

Supports: C C++ D Haskell Lua OCaml PHP Perl Plain Text Python Ruby Scheme Tcl

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rwl
I was wondering about this too. But what good is being able to code in a
browser unless you can actually [compile and] _run_ your code somewhere? I can
see how a browser-based editor could be great for editing JavaScript. But
unless the browser also hosts or provides access to a platform for the
language you're working in, what is there to be gained by coding in a browser?

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travisglines
I started constructorizer this summer but haven't had the time to do much with
it. Someday I'll get back into it and integrate git repositories and finish
features etc.

<http://www.constructorizer.com>

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aurynn
This will also be very useful for those of us with iPads, who want to code on
the go. :)

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omaranto
To code on my iPod Touch (I learned some javaScript and) had a little HTML
page with an input box and a button that would eval() the contents of the box
and print the result. With HTML5's offline capabilities it even worked without
connection. That worked but wasn't very pleasant, now there's JavaScript
Anywhere, jsconsole and ExecScript. If you want to program in JavaScript one
of those might suit you.

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prestia
For web development, <http://buildorpro.com/> is a newer option. It currently
only works in Firfox, but seems to be coming together pretty nicely.

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pluies
railsforzombies.com used Skywriter. I don't really know how the guys at
Envylabs integrated the code or if they modified it at all, but the end result
was definitely awesome.

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tcc619
Is there an easy way to access a terminal shell in chrome os?

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Groxx
Two ways:

* ctrl+alt+t (limited-functionality)

* switch to "developer mode" (hardware switch in battery compartment, erases all "personal information" when toggled)

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s3graham
I thought it'd be nice to make a build of Vim on NaCl. It seems like a hacked
up version of netrw could just read and write directly to
github/googlecode/whatever.

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cjoh
<https://bespin.mozillalabs.com/>

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ameyamk
Besides everything people mentioned, I use www.collabedit.com This one is
really useful.

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Vidura
Bram Moolenar works for GOogle, why won't Google Develop a text editor cloud
of vim with realtime collaborative feature it would be great for Chrome OS
also.

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rahulchaudhary
Here is a list of some of them <http://bit.ly/gxM8Wj>

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jerhinesmith
Since HN tends to frown on url shorteners, here's the full url:

[http://www.smashingapps.com/2010/12/07/11-robust-web-
based-e...](http://www.smashingapps.com/2010/12/07/11-robust-web-based-
editors-to-code-directly-from-your-browser.html)

