Ask HN: Best web text editor?

editors that can be accessed from the shell, via ssh

Right, I was about to say Vim myself. Especially with the project manager plugin and NERDTree - it works like charm. I am on Windows and Putty is always a life-saver for me.

I'm actually surprised that no one created a web fronted to either of them yet. Both of them support a multitude of interfaces anyway, so the hooks should be there. Running Emacs as a daemon would support simultaneous GUI and terminal editing too.

Yes, web-based VTxxx terminals would probably suffice, too, but I'd prefer a native interface.

Someone should do a EmacsHub, where you've basically got a little VPS running an emacs daemon, a web interface to it etc.

If you're frequently on-the-go, without your own laptop?

If you're on a restricted machine where you can't install anything, or have other install restrictions (hello, iPad! ;-))?

If you're on a shared computer where it wouldn't be nice to overwrite someone else's config files?

If you're on a mobile device?

If it allowed you do stuff that would be difficult or impossible to do with a local text editor? Like editing and testing web code live, without even perhaps a "save" command?

[Note: I'm not the OP and I don't actually want a web-based text editor for myself, but these are reasons that came to me in the first 2 minutes of thinking about it.]

I rolled my own little web IDE back in the day so that I could build out a PHP project while backpacking around the world. Part of that was a text editor that handled block indenting correctly and corrected for TEXTAREA's annoying way of dealing with doubleclicks to select text.

It was actually pretty nice, traveling without a laptop and simply dropping into an internet cafe and firing up any browser to get to work.

Naturally, the main issue was that you could only use interpreted languages like PHP with it. Django and Rails weren't even on the horizon at that point, so once I conclusively proved to myself that PHP is just not worth the hassle, I picked up a fast laptop and a copy of VS.NET and haven't looked back.

Out of curiosity, why wouldn't you? We don't think twice about Google docs being a good idea, or a thousand other things that were once thought to be purely desktop applications, why should coding be any different? I think it's very striking how few good editors there are on the web, and no real IDEs (that I know of).

stupid question, how to set ruby syntax highlighting on bespin?

Third question: 'save test.py' results in 'the current buffer is untitled, please enter a name' when I'm fairly sure I've just specified one.

The Apps Script editor in spreadsheets seems pretty good actually. It does "intellisense" style code completing.

No code folding, syntax highlighting, etc. unless I'm mistaken.

Squad, you're killin' me. Couldn't they figure out how to handle the tab key???

If you hit tab, it just eats it (which I guess is better than tabbing you out of the window), but why not simply insert a tab while you're at it? (or is it taking sides on the tabs vs. spaces debate?)

These are acceptable, but there's enough keystroke lag that using it for coding gets pretty annoying. Editing files locally fixes the most important latency issues.

By that logic, so does Google docs.

* My projects are stored in the cloud at github. My servers are often too.

* I have to use different editors (or no editors at all) on different laptops and phones.

* Having multiple checkouts of my data seems a bit skilly when I could have one.

Appreciate there's a need where the aforementioned exist, just wondering if there's a cloud ver.