Scrawl – A modern, cross-platform C#, VB.NET and JavaScript IDE | Hacker News Reader

Scrawl – A modern, cross-platform C#, VB.NET and JavaScript IDE

fluentco.de

84 pointskhellang69 comments

Founder of fluentCODE here. Really happy to see this posted, we just pushed really hard last night to get the site up. Lots of good comments -- I'll just add that we will be a lot more than just a C#/VB/JS editor. We've got plans to build CodeEngines for F#, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, CSS/SCSS/SASS/LESS, PHP, python and lots of framework specific bits for each of those.

We're a small team working hard on a product we believe in. Ask anything and I'll try and respond if I don't fall asleep!

This looks interesting and I would love to try it so do you all have any plans of releasing a trial version or giving a trial period?

When we hit v1.0 we'll have a trial download available.

will the alpha version pricing still be available at that time?

If things go as planned, this pricing will go away before the v1.0 release.

Awesome. Sounds good and I look forward to trying it.

SQL seems to be missing from that list. Is that on your roadmap at some point?

We want to do some cool stuff with SQL down the road. We'd start with features like a query result browser, but could expand that into things like query analysis too.

We don't have it pegged for a specific release just yet though.

Ruby?

Yep! It's in the backlog; to start we'll probably use srclib [1] under the hood to provide the code intel bits, and we'll do some special UI wrappers for bundler/gems.

[1] https://srclib.org/

We've been working hard to make srclib's backend more powerful, and we've just started to build features that take advantage of the new backend. I've sent you an email, and we'd love to work more closely as srclib nears v1.0.

FYI, Go is missing a full featured IDE and Go is picking up steam. Not much competition in this space yet although JetBrains I think started putting real effort into the plugin.

I really like Go and have definitely felt there's room for great integrated tooling there.

I want to do Go as one of our early code engines. We'll probably start off using srclib for early Go support and then build up some bigger features around the compiler tools, go fix, and so forth.

This looks great. I always enjoyed Visual Studio but Monodevelop/Xamarin Studio always feels a bit rickety to me. The key for me is refactoring and code intelligence which is briefly mentioned on the homepage, but can you shed any light on your plans in this area?

Also, a minor thing - what's the typeface in the "PROPORTIONAL FONTS" screenshot?

We're building on/and hoping to contribute to the community Code Fixes/Code Actions being built for Roslyn as far as refactoring goes in C#. We have some plans of providing a similar interface for other CodeEngines to implement diagnostics/fixes.

The font is Input Sans [0]. Great font. We wanted to try and package it with Scrawl but we never heard back from the author. Its free though, go try it out!

[0] - http://input.fontbureau.com/preview/?size=14&language=python...

Thanks! It would be fantastic if individual refactorings could be packaged up and shared via github or some kind of package manager...

Thats pretty much the plan, we have some fun ideas here but I need to prove out the UX before I can share much more

Smart timing. With .NET pushing for cross-platform, there's going to be space for a good IDE until (if they ever do) the porting of Visual Studio. How heavy is it? I was looking for a lite IDE (if there is such a thing) for my netbook that installs all in one directory.

We want to make sure it's light enough to run on netbooks/travel computers.

We've got a Dell Venue 8 with an Atom processor lying around that we're using as a test device to make sure things still run well under CPU constraints.

We haven't looked too close yet at one-directory deployment or running off a USB stick, but I just added a sticky note to our backlog to see if we can do it cleanly.

Cool, maybe cross compile to JS and run on the Chromebook as well? A full-featured IDE on devices with restricted resources would be great.

Just throwing this out there. I'd pay double the price of this if you included amazing F# support.

An F# CodeEngine is currently in the backlog for the v1.0 release. It'll be the kind of thing that evolves quickly I think. Thanks!

Just as a general note of interest, I too would pay double the price for solid F# support!

Neither free nor open source. Does it matter? This is not a text editor. This could be THE best non-bloated IDE. The price seems pretty reasonable to me. Bought it already!

You bought it without even test driving a trial?

Yes. I don't see any reason why not.

I'm not sure i'd use this. Visual studio is a great tool, and is about 90% of the reason I use dot net.

That said, though it's improving, Javascript support still has a long ways to go. I find myself writing increasing amounts of it as Knockout and Angular become standard place. I crave to have some of the features that I have with editing C# while editing javascript.

If you provided that, i'd buy a license. Though my preference would be a plugin (like resharper) as opposed to a whole new editor.

I'd also pay a lot more than $75. I already pay $150 at home, and $300 at work for resharper, i'd pay the same for increased javascript support.

.Net is going cross platform. What are you going to use if you develop on OSX or Linux? It won't be VS

Xamarin Studio.

Personally I'm not too fond of Xamarin Studio. I really hope Scrawl will be a good alternative for writing C#.

Unless of course they push to make VS cross platform. I wouldn't be surprised if this is in the works. There has been a huge push at MS to become more cross platform with their product offerings. They must know a lot of their developers run OSX with a Windows VM just to run VS. I know pretty much our entire team does that.

As someone who has worked with Visual Studio and integration APIs for a long time, a port of VS across platforms would be a huge undertaking. A rewrite, essentially.

Visual Studio is heavily tied to WPF (Windows-only) presentation framework, COM (Windows-only) for communication across components and plugins, as well as bits of native legacy code throughout (Windows-only.)

Truly, you're looking at rewriting Visual Studio to get it on OSX. Heck, MS would probably be better off just buying Scrawl and rebranding it as Visual Studio for Mac.

And remember: while .NET is going cross-platform, there are no public plans for a cross-platform UI toolkit; there is no cross platform WinForms or WPF from Microsoft.

If Microsoft made VS cross platform, they would make a much more lightweight, modular IDE aimed at (initially) C#,VB,F# and javascript. They'd be able to leave out decades of that old COM/Win32/C++ cruft.

Essentially, this is what they would make. Or, they could simply buy this...

Why do i need to care? Today the only cross platform thing I worry about is if my site works correctly in IE/Firefox/Chrome/Safari. I don't care about my tools, I use windows, in the past I've used windows in a virtual machine on OSX. I'm not worried about it as a web developer.

We've got more direct support for Angular, Knockout and React in the backlog but I don't want to lie to you and say its happening tomorrow. Soon though. Thanks for your feedback!

This looks great, but I'm not willing to put down $75 to alpha test a product.

Don't forget those that have to have C# support in text editors now there are plugins for Brackets, Atom, Sublime, vim and Emacs via http://omnisharp.net

How do you hope to win with now free ( for single user) Visual Studio?

Linux and Mac versions, I bet.

I could see the cross-platform capability being a draw for coding for mono.

I would love to have a free for education use cross-platform minimalist IDE for C# that I could use for middle school programming classes I teach.

Visual Studio has been effectively free for almost ten years with the Express Editions launching in 2005 (which can be used for commercial purposes).

The only thing that has really changed is that Microsoft has re-merged all of the individual Express Editions into one coherent [free] product, and they have enabled things like Visual Studio Extensions.

The biggest "problem" I have with the free versions is lack of Microsoft unit testing. Aside from the differences aren't that great (and I have Visual Studio Ultimate at work, and I still rarely notice the differences).

As to what their USP will be: I would imagine that it works on Mac and Linux. It is cross-platform, so it works on all three of the major OSs unlike Visual Studio (but somewhat like Sublime).

under "Themable"

https://fluentco.de/images/ScrawlThemeableGraphic.png

can't wait to use that one :)

The "Hot Dog Stand" theme was actually requested by more than one person. Gotta give the people what they want.

If we need to compare value to price ratio using JetBrain's products, for example, $100 (discounted to $75) is a bit too much. I won't even compare to the free Atom, which thanks to plugins and architecture is turning quickly into a fully-featured IDE.

Looks nice but as a current Sublime user, I'd like to know about plugin support.

It may be because I'm only able to see the mobile site, but whilst I can see a mention of "themability", I can't see any mention of extensibility via third-party plugins.

Theres a good bit discussing the modular nature of how we're building Scrawl on the site but we will have a complete, very powerful plugin SDK.

Does it have nuget (and / or npm etc) support? Pretty essential feature for a .NET IDE

What is the difference between a text editor with programming features (which it seems like what they are aiming for) and a full fledged IDE then?

We had package manager support in our prototype and will have it in the main branch again for the v1.0 release. First nuget, then npm and bower. There will also be extensibility points here to introduce new package managers easily.

How does this compare to Brackets and Atom?

A comparison table would be a useful addition to the website.

Ah, I missed one rather important way Scrawl differs - it isn't free.

One major difference: It's a native app, so it will use less resources, be snappier, and able to handle bigger files.

Actually, this isn't the day and age where native code IDE can be presented to be advantageous. I think what's sensible is to assume that no thick-client IDE is sufficient for arbitrarily sized projects.

There is typo under the header Timeline, "We still have a long ways to go — here's our plan." ... Ways.

On another note, why would I use this instead of visual studio?

To use on OSX and Linux

"Long ways to go" is a bit of a colloquialism and not necessarily a misspelling.

As a Sublime fan, this looks really nice in comparison. However, as a PHP developer this is something I want for my Laravel applications.

Our backlog includes support for a PHPCodeEngine and framework support for Laravel and Symfony. Its not the first thing on our list but it will happen!

It woudl be great if you posted a few more screenshots of the IDE. I mean full-size ones.

I don't see trial download link there, or I missed something?

alpha bits will be released in the following weeks I believe

I believe trial will come after 1.0.0 is released. So hopefully soon!

What is the stack behind this IDE ? GTK# or a Chrome Engine ?

No debugger? As an editor it looks very nice.

Our prototype had functioning debugging with breakpoints/locals/etc. It will find its way into the main branch in the next few weeks.

Screenshot of the prototype debugging a scriptcs .csx file: http://i.imgur.com/NMK00Jc.png