Ask HN: Browser based IDEs. Do they work?

[circuiter]

Does anyone here work predominantly with a browser based IDE? There seems to be a lot of them popping up lately so I was hoping you could share your experience with which IDE you use and what you use it for.

[danpalmer]

I'd love to be able to use a browser based IDE for development on a Chromebook or other machines that I haven't fully set up, but I can't see it happening for a while for the following reasons:

- Plugins - a major part of any IDE like Eclipse or Visual Studio, or text editors like Sublime Text - Speed - Single threaded JavaScript isn't going to beat multithreaded Python, Java, C#, etc, and when dealing with large text documents, or trying to apply meaning to code structure intelligently like modern IDEs do, this is going to be even more of an issue. - System Integration - I use keyboard shortcuts for a considerable amount of my work in IDEs, but the ability of a browser to use keyboard shortcuts is severely diminished. Something like Vim's command mode might work, but this is only one style of shortcuts that many people are unfamiliar with or actively dislike. - System Programs - IDEs are supported by a large number of programs behind the scenes, this would mean any IDE would probably need to be backed by a VPS anyway, and then not only are you even more dependent on an active connection, but also you have a large cost overhead just to be able to work from another machine.

[alexhawdon]

I used ShiftEdit to develop a Python/Django webapp. I appreciated the cloudiness as I was quite mobile at the time and my laptop wasn't particularly portable. At the time it was the only free offering that didn't require a connection to GitHub, necessitating the code be open-sourced (quality was a bit low/hacky and the world didn't really need to see it!). Overall, I was pretty pleased with the experience.

Now I run Sublime Text on a laptop that goes everywhere with me and deploy using a proper VCS. I would certainly use ShiftEdit again in future if I was stuck without my laptop and needed to make a few quick changes to something, but I wouldn't use it as a replacement for a local editor.

[throwaway344]

I use nitrous.io . It's fast, comes with all the python tools I could need, and the support is near instant. I have one free development box, and it syncs from my Chromebook to my desktop . All I could want really is a better editor (Ace please!)

[mark_l_watson]

+1 on nitrous.io

I have only played with it so far, but it is nicely done.

BTW, Google has a very nice web based IDE but it is for internal use only.

[dasboth]

Do you mean something like http://ideone.com/? It's something I found the other day but haven't tried yet. I think it's probably more for testing some code snippet rather than working with a larger application, though. One I do use, however, is Adafruit's WebIDE for developing on the Raspberry Pi. http://learn.adafruit.com/webide/ Perfect solution for coding on the Pi and it's linked to Github/BitBucket.

[n3rdy]

I've just started playing around piecing together one. I'm using node.js as the server, redis as the database and virtual file system, ace for the text editor, jquery and some jquery ui plugins for the rest. My goal is to build something I can roll out and run with a raspberry pi and use as something like a pocket cloud ide.

Also for editing the actual html and other files, I wrote a small console app in c# that uses the FileSystemWatcher class to monitor a htdocs folder, which updates the redis key/values in realtime.

[disdev]

I've had pretty good success with Cloud9's IDE.

I like that it's SSH based... I can secure it reasonably well and run any terminal command I need. It has decent code completion (at least for Node), a nice file tree view, can format code with indentations, etc... overall, a pretty nice experience.

The way I have it set up, is I work on a dev VPS (using their SSH). For any deploys, I check in my code, then can terminal into the production machine and git it. So, I can debug through the dev setup, then deploy to production when ready.

[ialexpw]

I've just started trying to use https://codio.com/ it's pretty nice, not sure if it can take over desktop-based ones though.

[Tarang]

I've had a terrible experience with them. Some of them try to do code sharing/OT but if I typed too fast they would crash my browser & I lost all my changes. I think my latency played a role but i'm not too sure.

That said I know of people using them with Chromebooks. Its nice because they can code the same file at the same time.

[eonil]

I really wanna know how those IDEs offer debugging.