Neutron Drive - A code editor for Google Drive and Chrome | Hacker News Reader

Neutron Drive - A code editor for Google Drive and Chrome

neutron-drive.appspot.com

81 pointscyberpanther23 comments

Won't replace Emacs for me for a simple reason - even if this editor supported rebinding keyboard shortcuts, the platform - Chrome - won't allow to bind some key combinations, like CTRL+n. It's a failure of the platform, not the editor; web version of Emacs (featured on HN some time ago) is also unusable on this browser.

Totally understand and noticed Chrome is taking away more shortcuts. Used to be able to do Ctrl-O and now with Chrome 21 that stopped working, and it always opens the open dialog.

Does anyone have examples of good use cases for this? I personally can't imagine why it would be more useful than my full IDE, though I'm eager to hear how others might use it.

Agreed this might not replace your full IDE, but it could maybe used as a compliment to your normal development for a quick update on the go, or maybe you need to review some code when your not at your desk. Also once Google releases the docs collaboration API, you'll be able to do pair programming.

I use cloud9, which has ace as the base platform as well. It completely replaced Aptana (Eclipse based fork) for me. I use it exclusively for development and it works quite well.

You should blog about it. I am really interesting in knowing your workflow and the reasons.

I don't have time to blog, unfortunately. The reason was simple, I wanted a development stack that includes as little natively installed software as possible. With just Chrome, I have everything I need. I connect via VPN to my office network. The Secure Shell extension lets me connect to my server via SSH, Cloud9 allows me to edit code, and I can see my work in the same browser. In the end, I can develop on any machine that has a modern browser installed.

If I understand correctly, this naturally handles concurrent multiple users the way a normal Google document would?

Looks very cool!

Waiting for the Google to release their collaboration API to allow real time collaboration. But yes right now you can share a file just like you would as a Google Document.

By "concurrent multiple users the way a normal Google document would", I think manaskarekar meant real-time collaboration, so that's a no.

Looks really good. I had high hopes for Bespin, but I haven't heard anything about that in some time, so I suppose I'll start watching this project instead.

I know it's based heavily on GDocs, but my workflow is based around Dropbox. Maybe something could be rigged up there.

Bespin merged with "Ace" - the new project is at http://ace.ajax.org/ or https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace.

As an aside, I was sad to see Bespin go. It used canvas for rendering, while Ace uses the DOM. While the Ace team had good reasons for this, Bespin just looked so.. pretty..

Oh my, and this is based on "Ace", so we've come full circle.

I didn't realize Bespin was gone, that's a shame, but it looks like they're making a lot of progress. Being in the process of moving from a (dying) desktop to a laptop, I appreciate things like Chrome syncing where I don't have to spend a whole day configuring my browser any more. I am okay with moving more of my apps to the web, assuming offline mode is always an option. I look forward to more "cloud" products like this.

You may see a return to canvas with ace. I saw an upcoming version at Google IO and believe it used canvas and webgl.

What does "Google Drive revision control" mean in this case?

If ever use Google Docs, there is a complete revision history of all changes made to the doc. Neutron Drive implements this feature and keeps revisions for you also of any file you edit.

If you ever need to go back and revert to an old version of a file you can just review all your old versions and revert.

All files have revisions management in Google Drive. You can see this feature by doing: Right click on a file > Manage revisions...

Then it's up to the client using the Drive API to use the correct parameter when uploading a new change to create a new revision or overwrite the current revision.

It might be a nice app but it requires permission to perform R/W operations when I'm not using the application. Why do you need those permissions?

The app doesn't do this, but in order to list all files on your drive I had to request full permissions.

It might be nice to have this explanation visible on the page too (I was also a little disconcerted by it request so many permissions).

You can leverage App Engine's Channel API for some minimal collaboration techniques.

I wonder when they will offer side by side compare with older revisions.

Taking feature requests at: https://github.com/pizzapanther/Neutron-Drive/issues

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