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Comment by tedmiston | Hacker News Reader

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tedmiston

From the video this looks like Mozilla's version of JSFiddle or JS Bin, but with four major differences:

1. Mozilla's awesome docs built-in

2. Integrated tutorials while you code

3. Mobile screen size preview

4. Completely free and no ads

These are some nice differentiators IMO. I'll definitely give it a try.

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Also, like most (all?) Mozilla projects, it's open source. Neat!

https://github.com/mozilla/thimble.mozilla.org

The biggest factor in my opinion.

Some crazy dependencies. It would be cool if there was something like this completely local, an SPA for the UI and LocalStorage & IndexedDB for persistence and docs.

Seems the `package.json` is mostly development dependencies, and some HTTP server stuff. The front-end dependencies are tiny: https://github.com/mozilla/thimble.mozilla.org/blob/master/b...

Pretty sure some of those dependencies are dev-dependencies

Ah. Not apparent to the uninitiated!

Not a very nice thing to do anyhow. Guess it doesn't matter too much for this project but not marking development dependencies as such is horrible for any consumers of the module.

Thimble itself is an end-product, not a module. The only way to work with it outside of our deployment infrastructure is to run it with all the dependencies installed and brackets installed on the side. We're thinking of just dockerizing it, but there is no "casual install" for Thimble right now.

The other big difference is that with Thimble, you have a little file system for multiple html/css/js files. (JSBin/JSFiddle/CodePen etc only give you one of each within a workspace).

This makes it a really great way to teach basic web design/developed for an entire site (as opposed to individual components which I think CodePen etc excel at).

You're right. I was excited when HyperDev launched with support for multiple files in their web editor [0]. It really changes broadens the scope of what can be accomplished — the line between "snippet editors" and full-blown web IDEs is becoming increasingly thin.

[0]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2016/05/30.html

I like the workspace thing. My girlfriend is learning web basics on Treehouse and I know I personally dig the idea/execution of the workspace!

It looks like it's geared more for a learning or simple content tool, more so than JSFiddle (which feels more like a pastebin)

Having played it with it a bit more, yeah, definitely. For example, the key bindings are a little weird / non-customizable that I can tell and auto-completion leaves a bit to be desired vs Vim / Emacs / Sublime keybindings (which JS Bin offers). Also I couldn't find a way to support meta CSS languages.

One feature of JSFiddle I miss instantly is the ability to pull in a web framework via a dropdown. A reasonable counter-argument is that they're available as Google-hosted libraries[1], but you have to go hunt'm up yourself.

  [1]: https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/

The integrated tutorials / prompts are great. Thanks for the share.

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