The World's Most Powerful Browser-Based IDE – Codio | Hacker News Reader

The World's Most Powerful Browser-Based IDE – Codio

codio.com

33 pointsaps-sids55 comments

It looks slick but it asks you to sign up before you can try it. For me this is immediately offputting and I won't be bothering. All I wanted was to play with it a little bit.

I'm especially interested in Javascript autocompletion but from docs it seems comprehensive autocomplete is coming in the future [1].

[1] https://codio.com/s/docs/ide/autocomplete/

Also agreed here. I find it really misleading that the "try now" button is in fact "sign up" which needs to include my "real name"? No thanks.

I find it interesting that companies still try to pull this stuff off even after discussions like yesterday's on here about LinkedIn's dark patterns usage habits.

I was also nearly put off, but thought I'd give it the benefit of the doubt.

You're dumped straight into the IDE after the form - no email validation or anything, which is something I guess...!

agreed, I just decided not to try it because of the sign up.

I don't trust enough the company yet to just send some of my github details.

And then I'm just not ready to pay for an IDE, I work mostly from my home office, I don't actually need to pay for an IDE, Netbeans works perfectly.

> Netbeans works perfectly

That's an interesting point. As impressed as I am with codio's technology, I'm wondering what the use-case is. People who need to do lots of dev, but on a different laptop every day? Maybe developers who aren't allowed to go through a US border check with a company laptop? (although such developers would be unlikely to trust a cloud IDE, at that point...)

Weird.

There are a lot of advantages to coding in your browser. You mentioned just one of them. But primarily it means you have no stack to install and configure, as Codio Boxes provide all that for you. Also, you will find that server development is much faster, as the connection between Codio Boxes and the internet is much faster than that of your desktop.

Other advantages include collaboration, teaching/learning, and of course no need to install or keep anything updated on your desktop - other than your browser of course.

I've been thinking about this for a while:

What a good unique selling point for an online IDE would be, is automated online testing--preferably with continuous integration.

I've been in the position enough times that I'd like to contribute some small fix or feature to a project, only to be put off by the effort necessary to set up a local development environment to make my 5-line change.

An online IDE could completely forego that: fork the code online, make my change, automatically run all the tests (preferably instantly!) so I can check I didn't break anything, and send a pull request!

You suggestion makes complete sense. It would be a boon for public github projects, but still something that folks probably wouldn't pay for. Unfortunately, outside of your scenario I still don't see the value, ie. the setup time it takes for a new employee to setup their dev. environment is a tiny fraction of the time that they'll be spending working on the project.

You should check out https://www.nitrous.io/hack ;)

I (barely) evaluated some cloud IDEs few weeks back and I felt Cloud9 and Nitrous.IO were far superior to Codio or other IDEs. So, I'm wondering, what makes you say Codio is the most powerful? In any case, I still don't see enough value in cloud based IDEs to give up the speed that I get from developing locally.

I don't know if this is cultural, but I don't understand this kind of marketing. It's like those signs in some restaurants, e.g. "the best cappuccino in town" or "the world's best burger"...

It makes me instantly skeptical :)

Try it and see ;)

When I looked at various options to support a Real World OCaml IDE recently, I picked Codio because it didn't require any write access to my GitHub account. Cloud9 wanted access to all my repositories, including the private ones, just to sign in.

My notes here: http://anil.recoil.org/2014/03/26/codio-now-has-opam-support...

Never tried any of them. Could you please explain how Cloud9 and Nitrous.IO were superior? For the speed concerns, doesn't your browser being a thin client with a cache solve those problems?

Here is one reason Nitrous.IO is superior. I could actually run the php file that was created automatically on the box. I cannot do the same on codio.

Another reason is that Nitrous.IO has a desktop client that uses unison to keep files in sync. This means I develop locally using my favourite IDE and I get to preview it instantly on my nitrous.io box, I say instantly but I'm sure there is some latency, but I'm lucky enough to have an internet connection where CTRL-S, ALT-TAB, CTRL-F5 results in my newest code being ready without having to wait.

Sorry but I was hopeful that Codio could live up to it's claim, but the fact I can't even run their default PHP file is pretty sad.

There is a good reason for the PHP not working out of the box. With Nitrous you have to choose the type of Box you want - in this case, it would be PHP. But with Codio, a Box is a Box with everything you need. Which means you are not restricted as to what you can use it for.

Check out the docs on using PHP in Codio https://codio.com/s/docs/specifics/php/, but it's a simple matter of `parts install php5 php5-apache2 && parts start apache`, and you're up and running.

It's an important difference, I think. Thanks for the detailed explanation.

I can't be the only one who gets annoyed by the following: I wish to try services and tools, for example the disqus commenting function under some blogs or the mentioned IDES. When I click on the "Signup with..." button for an oauth access via twitter, facebook or, in this case github the software will asks me to create a username, password or email address. Then what is the point of oauthing in the first place? This leaves me baffled and angry and I immediately lose interest.

The reason is that Github does not always pass on your email to us, and we need to be able to contact you. Also, your Github username is not always available on our system, so you have to verify or choose a different one, as someone else may already be using it on our system.

Thank you for your clarification. Yet I wish more app creators would understand how I feel about these things (others might think so too):

You don't ever need to contact me unless it is for confirming accounts, which you don't have to, because I just oauth-handled you one. Username collisions could be handled by suggesting mangled or decorated names but aren't really the issue here. I am way more concerned about my email address.

It is not to be treated as a commodity and I hate the follow-up emails that I immediately receive, each and every one of them.

I understand the concerns that cause this behavior and believe it can be quite hard on today's market, so "hooking" in users by getting their email address might seem necessary. Yet I feel strongly about the whole thing. I don't want to give out email addresses and oauth is an appropriate way of handling identity and access. Not only is asking for an address redundant but it's encroaching. Maybe without this barrier you could improve the bounce rate.

I have used C9 and Nitrous (paid for both for a while) but I found that compiling any JVM based language causes these to choke quite a bit. I tested the free version of Codio right now and it started up the JVM + Compiler faster than C9 and Nitrous. Alas that isn't saying much. Testing with a minute ClojureScript project it still took 108.415 seconds for just the initial warmup (which is largely the JVM)

I know these are low resource boxes, but none of the collaborative web IDEs that I have tried even have an upgradeable package to get some more kick out of the box. I am not excited to pay more, but if I can get regular Linux box (even the five dollar digital ocean plan beats this out of the water time wise) compile speeds I would finally be able to stick to using one of these.

I know I can ssh in and run the code on my own server, but that adds an extra step with these IDEs.

Another reason is that I am trying to set up one of these services as a teaching tool, allowing people to view the code live without collaborating directly. C9 (and in some ways Nitrous) is fairly well equipped for this use case, are there any plans for Codio to look into more robust support for a many viewers -> single editor model?

Hey Boris, curious question here. If you could do an NFS mount to one of these collaborative IDEs so that you could compile on another VM but still get the collaboration of the IDE, would that be a nice compromise?

I think that this solution would work as long as I didn't have to re-init everything each session. Some of the IDEs, not exclusive to free options, dump the sessions fairly aggressively. (And it ends up being a new 'box' with only the project files remaining consistent) Which makes sense, but not helpful in my particular use case.

Alas, using the latest Firefox 29 (downloaded yesterday) all I get in response to 'Try Now' is :

Loading Codio, hold tight... Browser not supported!

Your browser is very old and will not work correctly with Codio. Please upgrade to the latest version or use a modern browser

Make sure you don't have settings or extensions (from previous installs perhaps) that are changing your user agent. I personally don't like sites checking user agents. I say give me what you got and let me decide of my browser is supported or not.

That is very strange, because I also use Firefox 29, and all works fine for me. What OS are you on?

Working fine for me, Ubuntu 14.04 / Firefox 29.

The editor has been written 1000x over. How are the refactoring tools?

Those are actually hard to implement. It's like programming languages: everyone likes to design them, but nobody likes to implement the tools for them.

Exactly. "IDE" is tossed around as a glorified editor these days—whatever happened to the integration with the languages beyond autosuggest and coloration?

I'm setting up Eclipse Orion[0] and Docker on my personal server at the moment, so I can code from my Chromebook. I played around with it a bit on OrionHub, and found it worked very well; an IDE for the browser and the web, rather than a desktop IDE shoehorned into HTML5.

Together with some form of automatic deployment system into my server, this should work fairly well for development, hopefully.

[0] http://www.eclipse.org/orion/

You could do that, but if you use Codio, all you need is your browser. Nothing else! It provides the server and code editor.

What about an internet connection?

I have not used Codio (yet), but that is a bold claim.

Google's internal web based IDE is awesome, as is the Haskell FPComplete.com IDE. Good luck competing with these IDEs.

I have used Nitrous.io for Meteor.js, and it is also pretty good.

>Google's internal web based IDE is awesome, as is the Haskell FPComplete.com IDE. Good luck competing with these IDEs.

Well, if it's "internal" it's no competition, and if it's for Haskell, again it's not much of a competition either.

Chrome's internal code editor may be good for editing client side code, but its no good for server-side code. Codio provides a full-stack server-side dev environment. So it's much more of an IDE than Chrome will ever be.

Please disable autoplay on that video. Some of us have heavily-capped internet connections and can't afford to have an HD video buffer in the background.

Even without autoplay enabled, many sites are setting the preload attribute which is a much less visible way to consume extra bandwidth. If this is a real concern for you I'd suggest an extension to block Flash and HTML5 video tags.

This is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6689759.

So in what meaningful sense does this support Pascal? It seems like the IDE's (not necessarily the box) support for Pascal is on only a slightly higher level than Notepad. There's very basic syntax highlighting, and non-syntax-aware autocompletion based on the current file. You even have to manually handle indentation, and to drop back a level, you have to delete the right number of spaces, one at a time.

You can't be an IDE until you're at least a usable editor.

There are a lot of programming languages to support, so please bear with us. But we're making good progress. What other languages do you use?

A number of them, but Pascal is a rare enough inclusion to have made me try it out — only to find that it shouldn't have been included in the list of supported languages, because it's not. Better to list fewer features but implement them well, in my opinion.

I understand where you are coming from, but its difficult to decide when such a feature becomes a feature. We have syntax highlighting for Pascal, so you could argue that we support it, but of course, there is a lot more that we could do to make Pascal devs lives easier and more fruitful.

quite a strange take, IMO. i guess you could just as easily claim "Support for over 60 languages out of the box" by integrating Codemirror [1], though i would consider this to be quite disingenuous.

without singing up, it's hard to say how much is there, but autocomplete, some form of function & class list and a syntax checker / linter would be a minimum to claim any form of language support in the context of an IDE.

my 0.02

[1] http://codemirror.net/mode/index.html

Personal UI Nitpick: Hovering over the titlebar items doesn't cause them to automatically drop down like I'd expect.

Deleted comment

Really? Link?

It's not that VS running in IE, but VS compiler use IE to pull stuff from internet, if my understanding is right. MS is never going to be that awesome.

IIRC, the VS compiler loads mshtml.dll to parse XML data.

Just wanted to comment to add that your AutoComplete video under Features is missing.

cough, er herm -- codiad, codebox, icecoder..

it's not "cod.io"?

Nope, that one's taken by a new app that's disrupting the fishmonger industry.

I don't see how this can be useful to me, compared to a desktop IDE + digitalocean $5 vps. Why pay more for something I already have full access to? I can see that this is a browser side IDE but there have been other's in this area like cloude 9, which I've used but ended up using desktop IDE because it was so frustrating to deal with.

I couldn't agree more. Well, almost. I'm still not convinced of the value of a $5 vps, is that primarily to have a production like test environment?

Generalizing this, I have 16gb RAM, an SSD, and a plenty of CPU horsepower. What benefit does running my development work in the cloud provide? In the past folks argued that it simplify's environment setup, but for that we have things like chef or ansible. So, someone please how do browser based editors make my life better?

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