Show HN: Andedit 2, a text editor for Android | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Andedit 2, a text editor for Android

andedit.com

26 pointsvbsteven20 comments

I don't know if you are attached to this editor, but if you are, I'm interested as to why you would post about it. Why post before I can actually download the editor? What is the advantage of telling people in advance? I don't care enough to subscribe, and I'm not going to remember to go back and look later.

I submitted the landing page to HN myself. Mainly to gather some feedback on the current feature set.

Smart move. And this fills a big need in the Android world. As far as I know, there's nothing quite like this on the Play store at the moment. I had thought about building this type of app myself but realized I'd probably never recoup the costs, since a significant amount of time and effort would be required to build a really good text editor tailored specifically to mobile.

Then, I shall make some comments (this might be too late, hope you come back and read it).

1) I hope that the 'remote files', in particular Dropbox, work well in off-line mode. I would most likely use this program on my nexus 10, which is often away from internet access.

2) While this is a bit specialised, I often connect a bluetooth keyboard to my nexus 10. In that situation it would be nice to make it easy to use ctrl / alt keys for something useful.

One thing I find confusing: is it git or Github support ? Because if it's git, you may want to change the logo. The octocat is representative of Github only.

Sorry for the confusion. It is indeed regular git support, not only Github. I'll try to find a better suited icon.

There is an official logo set: http://git-scm.com/downloads/logos

Looking good.

So far I've been sticking to the Dropbox text-editor, since it's a decent minimum viable editor, while none of the others Ive found have been good enough to warrant investing in.

If this delivers on all it seems to promise, I'd probably buy it just to have something nice to hack with locally on my Asus Transformer (as opposed to doing SSH+emacs).

Looks nice, I'll definitely check it out when it releases, but it seems like whoever succeeds at text editing on touch screen devices will have to come up with some genius new way of typing code.

I can only contemplate serious typing on Android with my tablets keyboard dock, but even then I've found the experience lacking. I hope this makes it less painful!

Super excited about this. I'd buy it in a heartbeat if it had git push, custom themes and extensible/customisable highlighting. Any word on the ETA?

I can't commit on an exact ETA yet but it should be somewhere in the next couple of weeks.

The syntax highlighter is opensource and can be found at http://colorer.sourceforge.net/ It has its own format for language definitions and color themes so it's definitely possible to add your own.

Besides git and syntax highlighting, and I won't be using git, what can this thing actually do that I can't already?

A demo is the very least to show off a new product, not a screenshot of a notepad clone with syntax highlighting and line numbers.

Besides, I run Debian Wheezy with xfce4 on Android. I didn't try git, but I can run Geany and vim. A full desktop OS is not perfect for phones, but with a keyboard attached it works very well. How would an app be better?

Interesting, especially at git support. How do you implement git on Android which don't have native git support?

My implementation is currently based on a slightly modified version of JGit.

I hope that you'll make heavy modifications to JGit, in other projects that switched from native Git to JGit (IntelliJ IDEA, Jenkins) I've nothing but troubles with our remotes.

FWIW, the Jenkins Git plugin has quickly switched back to native Git, because JGit doesn't work in the same way and it's a mistake to believe it does.

Try JGit with login/password on a remote under https; for additional fun, try to serve it with a self-signed certificate.

Very interesting! Would love to see more high-res screenshots. How are you planning to price the app?

I have not made up my mind yet about pricing. Comparable (although somewhat less-featured) apps are on the Play store with prices ranging from free to about $10.

More (development) screenshots can be found on the G+ profile. https://plus.google.com/b/117124473018253230848/117124473018...

Why would someone clone a repo if you can't push?

Cloning a repo, pulling changes and checking out revisions can already be useful for browsing a code base, doing code reviews, etc.

Pushing back changes is on my todo list but as it is a big block of work I'm probably going to release the first version with read-only git support.

Are there are already Android applications using JGit?

By the way, the features I would be most looking for in an Android text editor are:

* Loading and saving from SFTP/SSH (automatic sync on save) * Tabs or other convenient multiple views and file tree * Dropbox/Google Drive support (Saving to drive as gdoc) * Syntax highlighting including markdown formatting (maybe a preview mode for markdown with webview?)

Git could certainly be useful but it would depend on the implementation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com