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Ask YC: Online Text Editors.

21 points by izak30 ↗ HN
Ok, I've been looking for an online text(code) editor.

For WYSIWIG there are many options, and a few leading free ones, but I can't find anything in the Code Editing realm.

Preferably it'd be open source, secondly; if not, something that I can host/integrate and not a hosted thing.

I know you have apps doing on-demand code running etc around here, so surely somebody else is using something similliar to this.

Thanks

19 comments

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dfranke
Just curious, why do you want one? It seems to me that a code editor is almost uniquely unsuited to be a web app. You need to keep your data locally anyhow, unless your whole toolchain is a web service. Furthermore, my editor is a tool I want absolute control over: I don't want its behavior changing unexpectedly when a new update is released.
mechanical_fish
The closer the average textfield's behavior could be to that of emacs, the happier I would be.

Mac OS X supports a decent batch of emacs-style keybindings -- C-a and C-e work, C-k and C-y work, the cursor-movement keys work. Give me C-s and C-r and I would be even happier, though. Or C-x C-w to write half-written drafts of news.yc posts to files for backup. Or C-x C-i to import text from files on disk. The list goes on and on.

I type an unfortunate amount of text into browser fields during the course of a day. It would be nice to be able to make these fields work more like a decent editor, and by that I don't mean TinyMCE.

izak30
9ne is an e-macs type textarea project.. but it was too buggy for me to consider
brianloveswords
I can't think of a single time I've ever used C-x C-i. I have my C-w bound to backward-kill-word, which I definitely wish every editable text area would obey. I find it's damn near always faster to kill the whole word and retype it rather than C-h to the spot of the typo.
mechanical_fish
Well, that's emacs for you. Everyone gravitates to different bits.

Yes, backward-kill-word would be excellent. I have C-backspace bound to that in Emacs, but I also have a Kinesis keyboard, so C-backspace is just as easy to type as C-w.

dehowell
If you're a Firefox user, check out the "It's All Text!" extension. It lets you edit any text area in the external editor of your choice. For instance, I'm composing this comment in vim.

The download page at mozilla.com claims that it's hard to get working on Mac OS X, but that's actually not true. Skim through the comments... someone explains how do to it.

mechanical_fish
Thanks, this is just the kind of comment I was fishing for!

I was scared off by the claims that the OS X install was tricky. That and the fact that I don't use Firefox for anything but Firebug at the moment... I find Safari to be more stable and faster. This might tempt me to switch back to the Fox, though.

izak30
My product is a hosted CMS. I need a mediocre editor for Editing XHTML / CSS and minor Javascript and or PHP.
wenbert
are you looking for something like this? http://www.cdolivet.net/editarea/
izak30
YES. If I could give you another point for this I would. It's been ridiculously hard to find something that is matureish in this area.
aaroniba
appjet.com has an editor (written in javascript, for javascript)
maryrosecook
Not sure if this will do, but you if you're on OS X you can use TextMate's 'Edit In TextMate' to edit code in any text field in any web browser.