The Best Way to Help Programmers | Hacker News Reader

The Best Way to Help Programmers

c9.io

14 pointsmattpardee8 comments

I think they've done a very excellent job with Cloud9 and I've signed up to play around with it some more.

However, the problem to me seems that in order to reap the benefits of Cloud9 one has to give up the benefits of their current IDE. It will undoubtedly be the same situation for LightTable when they release.

I want collaborative editing in my IDE. If I'm using Visual Studio and my colleague is using SublimeText, I want to be able to work collaboratively with him/her. I've wondered if some sort of protocol could be created by which other developers could create plugins for popular IDEs that might allow cross-IDE collaboration.

Wow...I'm impressed. I just spent a few minutes setting up an account and I was blown away by your execution on the editor alone. I haven't even tried using the other features yet. The screenshots made it look very similar to SublimeText2 and I wondered how smooth it would be. Vim mode, zen mode, even the find options were very similar. I was able to do everything I expected to do, even down to getting the theme just right.

It's the first time I thought I could use a web-based editor. That's a big deal. Well done!

Thanks for the kind words! We try really hard to make the concept of an online IDE move beyond just editing and saving files in a browser.

Best of all, unlike ST2, we're open source: https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9

This is very slick. I especially love how the themes (View > Themes) update as you hover over them! It's a great way to preview your the color settings for your editor. I wish more UIs had this sort of live preview.

“In the year 2000… you will be able to instantly replicate your colleague’s dev environment on your own computer.”

Non issue, most companies use VMs for their dev environments for this reason among others.

True. Many companies have come up with solutions for this problem, including VMs. But imagine having a VM for every project without the need to download or distribute them. That's what Cloud9 offers~

That's a novel approach, but where does the IDE live, within the VM? Seems like performance would really suck with that setup, but perhaps I don't understand what all you have on the VM and what you have on the host OS.

At my company, we give developers several days (up to a week at times) to get everything downloaded, installed, setup, configured, etc. It's a huge drain but then again, you should've seen it 2-3 years ago, at which point the only avoidance of duplicated efforts was by virtue of having a single portable HD which held all of our databases [for use in testing]. The data was 5 years old at the time...

To just set everything up, several days to a week sounds extreme to me. The VM should hold the code, framework, db, etc.. It's basically a clone of the production environment that lives inside a VM on my host machine. It has a shared folder with my host machine which holds the code. I use an IDE on my local machine to edit this code, which the VM runs. No reason to put the IDE into the VM. This achieves perfect separation and has a total of a few hours setup time for most projects. Literally no duplication of efforts (except setting up the VM its self).

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