Comment by WayneDB | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WayneDB | Hacker News Reader

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Are you sure that you like the idea of in-browser editors? The only feature that I see as useful is the "zero deployment/any device" and I can't imagine that feature coming in handy very often.

What else do you like about them?

If you like vim or emacs - the Cons seem to far outweigh the one Pro that I can see for these types of editors:

  - Online only.
  - Client and service back-end usually not open source.
  - Far less robust, feature-wise.
  - Limited to using these for languages that their back-end supports.
  - Limited by browser technology. For instance:
  Can I break those tabs out to a new window? 
  How well does that perform? 
  Can I middle-click a document-tab to close it? 
  Does it integrate well with the rest of the 
  programs running on my operating system?

To the folks at friendco.de: Sorry for being negative. It's nothing personal - I just prefer native over web for my applications and I'm curious as to what people find to be good about web apps besides the one Pro that I mentioned.

Well, if everything else was equal and all features implemented the "zero deployment/any device" would be a great thing, no? As I said I like the idea, not current implementations.

Personally I would use it - and even if it had only a fraction of functionality I mentioned - for remote pair programming. It's so hard to make people feel comfortable with Emacs/Vim+screen/tmux!

As an aside, I think that an online editor with scripting capability would quickly catch up to native editors in terms of features.

Could you use VNC or simmilar to do GUI screen sharing and use the editor of your (and/or your partners) choice?

Also, regardless of scripting abilities, online editors are still limited to the abilities of the browser.

Well actually all the online editors have awesome scripting capability via javascript:)

> - rectangular selection and operations (v: Ctrl-v, e: C-x r ... or rect-mark)

Ace (cloud9 editor which friendCode uses) have pretty good support for sublime text style multiple selections, (with ctrl-alt-arrow keys) so emacs or vim style should be easy to implement. The main problem is that there are oly a few people who use online editors, so most of this things are not implemented yet.

I believe there are advantages and disadvantages to cloud based solutions, objectively the advantages that we offer are the following:

- Easy setup and update (all you need to do is signup) (good for beginners) - Realtime remote pair programming - You no longer need to setup execution environments on your computer locally.

We're definitely far from perfect. However I do think that there's interesting things to do with cloud based solutions, so that's what we're trying to do.

All feedback, for improvements are welcomed.

Easy setup and realtime pair programming are great. Auto-updates are good, but only if I like the updates :) Forced updates could be annoying and potentially catastrophic if handled wrongly, breaking users' workflow.

A pre-setup environment can be nice if it offers the amount of control that is necessary to accomplish the developer's goals.

My totally unqualified opinion on your venture is that you can be successful if you pursue partnerships with places like Heroku et. al. as well as offering it as a stand-alone service. Good luck!

No offence taken. That's perfectly understandable.

There are quite a few advantages to cloud based solutions, a major one being "simplicity", by that I mean that they're easy to setup and manage (zero hassle for beginners).

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