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Comment by tokyodude | Hacker News Reader

I have to ask what is probably a dumb question.

Why? I used CodeMirror on three projects. It was great. Now I use Monaco aka Visual Studio Code. What would CodeMirror offer ? With Monaco I get all the lastest feature of VSCode . Current versions of Monaco include Intellisense etc..

I'm honestly curious both what CodeMirror will offer and why even try to compete. Though I'm guessing the answer to the first question answers the second

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CodeMirror aims to be slimmer, and less of a cut-off piece of vs code. I also think our API is more well designed and expressive. And, as Adrian mentioned below, though he got downvoted, CodeMirror works on phones

The fact that it works on mobile is the biggest advantage imho. We use it for that reason.

For one thing, monaco doesn't even try to work on mobile browsers.

CodeMirror's existing code base is really clean and easy to understand, and it loads as native JS modules. It's good to have multiple projects in a similar area, and I'm excited about this rewrite as an embedder.

Monaco isn't exactly the easiest editor to extend. For those wanting to do custom editor functionality, it still feels like there's a ton of room for other implementations.

yeah Monaco is a code editor. CoreMirror can easily and nicely function as an "editor" in general. I used it in a big project for a specific kind of markdown editing experience. I checked out Monaco at the time and CodeMirror and CodeMirror was WAY easier to setup and integrate into my app.

I've evaluated both CodeMirror and Monaco in a project that had to show a dozen or so small code editors (highlighting, intellisense) on the screen; CodeMirror was a lot more lightweight and faster, whereas Monaco is a lot heavier and more aimed at having just a single instance per page.

I welcome competition in this space but two guys competing with Microsoft seems like impossible to win. Hopefully they get the funding and we can see what they can build

They are not putting _that_ much energy into Monaco, and these are not terribly huge systems. Also, I've been doing this for ten years, so that helps, in terms of experience.

It is possible that less than 2 people at Microsoft are working on Monaco full time but just getting passive improvements over time. Never underestimate 2 smart dedicated engineers.

I wonder how one Finnish engineer could possibly compete with all Microsoft's many engineers in the OS space.

I'd wager, by cloning another successful OS. Also, all Microsoft engineers didn't work exclusively on the kernel.

Monaco is maintained by a single guy from my understanding: https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor/graphs/contributo...

It just shows many contributors but looking at code commits and general activity (maintainers) in issues only Alexandru Dima comes out.

That's not where the monaco code lives. That's just for documentation. I think the actual code lives in the vscode repo

You say competing with Microsoft, but, CodeMirror is being used as the editor in Chrome, Firefox and Safari's dev tools, as well as Light Table, Brackets and Bitbucket - according to the blurb on their own home page.

I have no doubt that if those parties get more involved in CodeMirror, things could move very fast.

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