Cloud9 IDE lets you code together in the Cloud. And offline. And in Ruby, PHP… | Hacker News Reader

Cloud9 IDE lets you code together in the Cloud. And offline. And in Ruby, PHP…

c9.io

84 pointssergimansilla44 comments

Cloud9 IDE, the most beautiful editor, now lets you code together in the Cloud. And offline. And in any other language runtime in your own system.

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I really really want this product to work. I can see the potential/benefit in it. But every time I try it I'm left disappointed. I know it's probably me doing something stupid, but here goes my experience this time.

Oh cloud9 I really like this idea, lets see if it's improved since last time I looked -> click

I can sign in via Bitbucket cool I'll do that.

Okay that was dumb of me, my Bitbucket repositories are all private so I can't use cloud9 for this. I'll import my github projects instead.

Dang, Github is already registered to another account and I can't change it.

No problem, I'll de-active Bitbucket and delete this account, then sign in with the old account I created.

Doh, I can't remember my password, I'll reset it. Weird a new password is sent back to me in plain text? That doesn't fill me with confidence.

I'm in, the dashboard says I've only got one project in my Github repository, that's odd? Never mind, one project will do for testing.

Open project, click index.php, hmmm no syntax highlighting.

Never mind I'll just click on view then syntax and choose PHP. Nope that didn't work, not sure why, okay maybe it's because it's a PHP project and this is a Javascript IDE. I'll have a little play around and see what else is new.

Zend mode that seems interesting I'll click that. Ahh okay, that looks pretty. Right, now where have all my options gone, bugger. How do I exit out of zend mode? I can't remember the keyboard short cut and there's no hint. Okay never mind I'll just exit the IDE and login again.

Right back to the dashboard. Oh sweet, looks like my other Github projects have appeared. I'll try a Javascript based project.

Okay so start editing -> click on Javascript file -> no syntax highlighting -> click syntax button -> choose javascript, no syntax highlighting sigh... Maybe code completion will work, at least that's fun to try. I type "this.". No code completion, right well that's enough play time quit.

I don't doubt that all this stuff works, but for me in the 5 / 10 minutes I played around with this I've not managed to get the IDE to function how I expect it to. And it's the same thing every time. I really hope this post is taken positively as constructive feedback because I can see great potential for the product. I'd love some kind of automatic ajaxy getting started tour once I've logged in.

Hi Alan, I'm super excited to tell you that this new version has fixed at least 50% of your issues, and we are tackling those others very very soon. We support PHP now, both in syntax highlighting as well as running. With this release we included one private project for Free accounts! You can always reach us via twitter or support@c9.io. Cheers, Ruben

I attempted to use it in Chrome and Firefox on Lion. When I go to clone to edit a github repository, it just sits at this http://i.imgur.com/cLcum.png

I'm also having problems, but in Chrome on Arch. It hangs for a while telling me my git repository is being cloned, eventually telling me that [repository name] workspace already exists. Upon choosing a new name and continuing, it just keeps hanging indefinitely.

I just signed up with my github acct and it does not let me clone even a single private repository (username: aeon).

I'm happy to report a different experience. I've had major issues every time I tried it before, but this is the first time it is actually usable. And it works well!

I installed it on my own server. Editing local files. As always, it was a major pain to install (instructions fail for latest stable node, had to install v6 for it to work). However, after installation, it worked like a champ.

Some of the fancier features are still buggy, but the basics are solid.

Great job guys! Seriously thinking about using this to write code that puts food on the table.

  bin|⇒ ./c9 
  path.existsSync is now called `fs.existsSync`.
  ERROR: Could not determine your mac address! Make sure you are connected to the internet for the first run and login.

I'm pretty sure that I'm connected to the Internets. I do have a non standard setup where br0 is a bridge to eth0 due to having a bunch of KVM instances floating around, but the question is: why does it need my MAC address in the first place?

I'm having the same problem with offline mode. I know I'm connected and actively logged into my c9 account through the browser.

However, I'm using VMWare Player to host Ubuntu which could be a limitation regarding the MAC address retrieval process c9 uses.

I was really excited to give this a try, but I have to say that the sign up process and the upgrade to premium were both a rather trying experience. First, I ended up with a confusing situation where I had two accounts - not that big a deal, but a minor pain.

The real issue came when signing up for premium. First, requiring me to have a PayPal account is bad form - please provide some alternative to this. But, I decided to go ahead anyway, I got the subscription set up through PayPal, and was redirected to cloud 9 where I was supposed to have access to these awesome paid features, right? Nope. It has now been two hours and I'm still getting a "we're waiting for confirmation from the payment provider". Paying for something and not getting instant access is really poor UX - I hope you guys will see this and take it as constructive criticism.

Looking forward to finally giving it a try.

Love it. Love it. Love it. This is like having Sublime in the browser, anywhere, anytime.

Just need autocompletion and key shortcut remapping.

We do now have autocompletion. You can flip it on in your Settings panel.

Also, try hitting Command-Shift-E (I think Ctrl-Shift-E for Windows/*nix) to get a code outline of your current file.

Why isn't it on by default?

It is now. Sorry about that!

Didn't see a quick way to point this out through their site, so I'll point it out here on the off-chance one of the creators sees this thread:

Typo on the /pricing page: "This is were your files are stored, ..."

The product itself looks great though, I'm looking forward to hearing about any HN-ers experiences with it.

Thanks! Will fix this shortly.

In the bug list, when I try to access my dashboard I have some 404 error and I'm not able to access it. The url in 404 are the following : http://d6ff1xmuve0sx.cloudfront.net/2.0.2-d9f5bdba/static/da... http://d6ff1xmuve0sx.cloudfront.net/2.0.2-d9f5bdba/static/re... http://d6ff1xmuve0sx.cloudfront.net/2.0.2-d9f5bdba/static/sh...

It works now!

He he--fixed! Thanks.

Sorry, found two more! Look for "This is the platfor professional developers have been waiting for." and "... always milliseconds awavy from ..." on the /features page.

Maybe I'm really completely outdated, but I would like my IDE to be able to open a file in 5 seconds. It should not take me less than a minute to figure how to open a file either. I work on a lot of small scripts that don't even get commited (and are very likely forgotten).

I personally had horrible experience with the previous version (nothing worked) and still waiting to finish hg clone of stuff (and migration of a small package). SIGH I think I'll give a go for the next version.

That said the idea is absolutely incredible, but a little leaner first-steps would be awesome. Since this is in the web anyway, can I just go and edit a file on the web to see how it works? I don't particularly care if anyone sees it or if it even gets saved. I want to be able to play with a demo.

Still migrating/cloning. I think I give up for now

Would love to try it, but wondered if it supported the language(s) I want to use first. I gave up trying to find the list of supported languages. Consider making the text "and 23 other languages" on the home page a link.

Tried installing this a week or two ago but ended up with an issue with libxml. Took me an age to sort it (not got much experience with how npm works). Finally got it sorted but then couldn't figure out a way to add authentication, so gave up. Would be good if they came up with an easier installation, especially as it looks so promising.

This release is a complete rework of the version that was online two weeks ago. Check the download links at the middle of http://c9.io/site/features/ to download a local verson that can sync with online.

Any reason there's no Windows app?

The real killer for me last time I tried it was not being able to edit local files. I have so many projects downloaded and set up that having to move them to the cloud just to make a quick edit is not worth it. Is this something the local app fixes?

Windows is coming soon, few weeks.

I've been a paying customer for a month or two. Seems like a very nice update, however it broke git for me.

  $ git commit -m "Small fixes."

  error: pathspec 'fixes.' did not match any file(s) known to git.

Sounds like you will have to use 'git commit' until they fix this.

Seems that -m doesn't take quotes in their terminal. This ought to work:

    git commit -m Small Fixes

But I can't find a way to push to my repo on GitHub. I get this error:

    Permissions 0640 for '/var/lib/stickshift/a5a56c6a46e2dd7/app-root/data//.ssh/id_rsa' are too open.
    It is recommended that your private key files are NOT accessible by others.
    This private key will be ignored.

The signup page says I get 1 free private project, but another popup said I get no free private projects. Which is it?

Also, I clicked 'clone' on a public github repo of mine, and nothing ever seems to happen.

How do I go about pair programming with someone using this? I shared the URL but it didn't work.

What was your experience ? Your buddy (who I assume has a Cloud9 account) should join your project in read-only mode, and then you can grant RW access.

To me, pair programming is one person codes while the other watches. And then vice versa.

Both parties could access the project but it was just collaboration, not pair programming.

Please add Haskell syntax support. Thanks!

Perhaps even more importantly, Cloud9 is based on the ACE code editor (http://ace.ajax.org/) which, by itself, is a really phenomenal piece of work. When you look under the hood it's way more complex than you might imagine.

I can tell you the node libraries I wrote for this release are very cool in their own right as well. See the c9 account on github for most of them. I'm especially proud of the vfs system.

I'm trying to extend ACE with syntax highlighting for a DSL we use. Has anyone done this? It seems a bit daunting (each language included with ACE seems to import code from all over the place--unlike say, Textmate, where you can just write an independent file for each language)

(BTW: New cloud9 looks really neat. Very impressive stuff)

I wrote a LaTeX syntax highlighter for it. I found the easiest thing was to copy and paste a simple one and build from there.

I wonder how easy it is to extend the AutoComplete functionality? I would kill to have this integrated with MarGo and Gocode the way GoSublime does. That would give me all the functionality I need in Sublime today, but in my browser and with collaboration. I would die a happy hacker.

Cloud9 uses Treehugger (https://github.com/ajaxorg/treehugger) for all language analysis and completion features. It's an AST framework, so it should be fairly easy to plug in other languages.

Well the thing is, GoCode and MarGo are standalone daemons that are queried for completion results, or linting, etc. So I would almost need a higher level place to hook it in to Ace.

It's definitely possible to have a server-side component for doing that kind of stuff, and that has been something we've been experimenting with ourselves. The interface for these services is already fully asynchronous, which helps communication with a server component, but it still requires some manual work for the network communication and marshalling.

I notice a huge growth of the links to .io domains here :P

I already have far more than I should, as you can get some really nice names which are normally taken. Now if only I had a use for -any- of them.

I'd order one, but paying that much for a domain is too expensive.

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