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Comment by omarrr | Hacker News Reader

I see many valid points in your argument but at the same time I find myself more and more wanting to offload the responsibility of maintaining my tools to a 3rd party. The more online/subscription services I use the happier I am because I don't have to spend time installing and upgrading tools, archiving content, etc.

Some content I don't want to own (music, books, etc), some cloud services are open source (so they can live well beyond their creators) and some other services combine local and remote access (eg. github). As much as I want full control, I also want options.

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Yeah but they are limiting the ways in which you can use your tools. It sounds like what you really want is just a way to persist your tools & files between OS installations & dead laptops...

Imagine having a build script that initialized all your software licenses, and that the tools all auto-upgraded in the background. Isn't that way better? I think this is kindof the GNU Tools & apt-get dream.

I'm sure the lines between software & cloudware will blur, so shouldn't the goal should just be freedom & control. Offloading tools (as the above poster mentions) is, I agree, just a scam to get you to pay... It's like paying for iTunes just to have it auto-update without asking for your permission. And if you hate the new version, sucks for you because using a new media player involves using proprietary tools to transfer your data & account, rather than just installing a new player & pointing to the same media folder.

I love the concept of the web-based tool. It's really not a lot different than SSHing into your own server, except a better ui (Much like using Gmail instead of Pine to read email).

These types of developer tools will makes it easy for me to move between OSes and even types of devices. These types of tools will eventually allow us to work from out Tablet (maybe for a quick 20 minute editing session after dinner because you just came up with an idea how to do something) , Phone (quick a fix type/spelling error while waiting for the train), desktop (your routine daily development).... all from the same setup. This is the future I look forward to.

Granted: this type of stuff won't fly for corporate/enterprise work for a long time....

This seems like the opposite of options. (Not that it doesn't seem like a pretty nice tool -- if for nothing else than jsfiddle on steroids.)

Thanks for your comment, but just a quick note on comparisons to jsFiddle and the like...

Tools such as JsFiddle, CodePen, etc. are extremely limited by design. They are intended to simply demo and showcase HTML, Javascript and CSS. Codio is a fully-fledged IDE and code editor, and does a lot more. Take a look at our homepage and you'll why.

So while we can do what JsFiddle and co. can, and would be delighted if you used it for that purpose, our main goal is to get you guys to use Codio as your IDE of choice.

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