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Ask HN: Web-based coding text editors? (for coding on the cr48)
75 points by jaxn on Dec 10, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 56 comments
All of this talk about the new Chrome notebook has me thinking about moving coding to the cloud.

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).

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 ;)




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.


This project is pretty active on github


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.


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


Works pretty well, but doesn't seem to like my esc key...

/saves for later; thanks for the link!


It seems to accept C-[ as a replacement.


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


Just go into the Extensions window and then Vimium preferences; you can add this vi page to the list of "excluded URLS".


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


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.


This is what I do on mine,

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


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.


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.


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.


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.


It appears that they are full or not accepting new customers at the moment because I cannot find a "Buy" button.


I'm assuming this is on the CR48? So this means there is a built-in terminal system? I was wondering about that, if they'd allow you past the browser front-end or not.


There is a very restricted terminal, basically allowing SSH and a couple of other things. If you flip the developer mode switch, you get full VT and shell access: http://www.chromium.org/poking-around-your-chrome-os-device


http://www.ymacs.org/


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


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_JavaScript-based_...

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


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.


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


I'm curious about how would you sandbox the code that users write so that it won't affect the system?

Would love to see an open source implementation!


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


You sure? http://cl.ly/3a5v


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


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


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


yeah, I've always wondered why they took that down.


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.


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


(clickable)

https://mozillalabs.com/skywriter/


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


http://jsfiddle.net/

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


I wrote about this a while back: http://teabuzzed.com/2009/09/its-time-the-case-for-a-browser...

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


http://kodingen.com/ is alright.


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.


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.


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


Executable pasties: http://codepad.org/

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


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?


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


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


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.


I'd rather code with a pen and paper than on an iPad!


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


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.


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


Two ways:

* ctrl+alt+t (limited-functionality)

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


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.


https://bespin.mozillalabs.com/


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


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.


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


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...




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