A rich new JavaScript code editor spreading to several Microsoft web sites

[noonespecial]

Every once in a while Microsoft still does something exactly right. And it makes me wistfully sad for all of the missed opportunities.

Yes, I was one of those who did an all-nighter outside a store waiting for win95.

[mixmastamyk]

Re: 95, turns out it was easy to just get on to the beta list. Reminds me of a funny story...

Summer of '95, I was sitting at the weekly roundtable meeting of our IT department (at an R&D lab I used to work), and explaining to the boss that I could get my hands on a new beta of it from a friend so we could kick the tires. The whole team seemed interested and leaned in. "So," the boss says, "Who is your friend... he must be some VIP at a big operation, eh?"

"Nope," shaking my head.

"Well, who?" asks the boss.

"He's a high-school student."

"BWAH-HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAahahah...."

[nivla]

>I was one of those who did an all-nighter outside a store waiting for win95.

I remember coming across a picture from that day [1] and thinking to myself how similar the excitement is to the modern day product release from Apple. Yes Microsoft has become the company everyone loves to hate but I think they were considered cool or hip back then.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/4Ng1ELA.jpg

[smegel]

Not me, I was an OS/2 holdout for a year or so. Superior networking you see.

[WayneDB]

Actually, they do a lot right. That's why 9 out of 10 businesses on the planet use their operating system.

[boromi]

I really enjoy typing with this text editor. It feels just right: nice colorscheme, nice cursor width, nice bracket matching and code highlighting. I hope MS makes a native windows 8 app using the code editor or give it under a free licence it so that other can make the app.

[AceJohnny2]

Have they announced this anywhere? If not, when are they firing their marketing department?

[michaelwww]

This video was on reddit/r/programming recently but only got two upvotes. I feel it's worth more attention than that.

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Text-Editor-from-SkyDrive-wit...

Edit: It's had almost 30,000 views, so it's getting attention.

[RyanZAG]

Suprisingly enough, this really is the release announcement. This is their marketing department.

Scott Hanselman ... Microsoft employee.

It's Microsoft's new marketing strategy - they try to promote 'organic growth and acceptance' of new products through social media and viral advertising. I don't believe it works very well - it always comes across as a bit false and pollutes the real comment environment, giving viewers the strange feeling that something is wrong. It also creates a lot of antagonism when paid employees actually argue with detractors, etc.

[willsun]

The official release announcement (at the bottom of the post):

http://blogs.windows.com/skydrive/b/skydrive/archive/2013/07...

[chr1]

In http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2013/3-314 around 00:54:40 Anders Hejlsberg mentions that there is a team in Switzerland working on that editor, and it is written in TypeScript.

[michaelwww]

I just installed SkyDrive to try it out. I already had an account for my VS Express 2012 so in under 30 seconds I was editing a file and trying the code completion. It looks good and works well, so it's a nice offering from the Microsoft coders. (Gee, I sound like a marketing shill but I'm not, I just happen to love TypeScript and Visual Studio, although TS failed me in a surprising way today - but this isn't the post for that.)

[malandrew]

How does it compare to Ace and CodeMirror?

[0] http://ace.c9.io

[1] http://codemirror.net

[marijn]

That's hard to say until they actually release documentation. When I first noticed it [1] 10 months ago, it seemed very flaky and slow, but it appears to have improved a lot in the meantime.

[1]: https://twitter.com/marijnjh/status/252814288891285505

Still, it's closed source, so for now, not very relevant for the rest of us.

[stefanve]

I freaking love c9. But I will try out the MS thing.

[acchow]

Amazing.

Has anyone used this? Does it reference symbols across files? I imagine it would be rather expensive to actually have a compiler front-end running live in the cloud across my project.

[PommeDeTerre]

What exactly is "amazing" about it?

This is the sort of functionality that has been made available by numerous text editors and IDEs for numerous programming languages for many, many years now.

It's somewhat unusual to see how so many in the JavaScript and web development communities can get so excited about catching up to where basically everybody else was decades ago. It'd be one thing if JavaScript and web development were new creations, but they're not.

While this may be useful in some cases, it's surely not "amazing".

[aaronbrethorst]

    not quite intellisense, as it's just one file at a time

[tommyd]

Looks like the (very impressive) editor on their Try F# site (which serves as a great introduction to the language, providing you with a scratchpad/REPL and output window for in browser coding): http://www.tryfsharp.org/

[ktt]

Yep, that's the same editor (Monaco). This can be easily verified by checking the HTML.

[Guillaume86]

Related discussion on codeplex (typescript specific): http://typescript.codeplex.com/discussions/401549

And a ACE/typescript integration with code validation and autocomplete: http://guillaume86.github.io/ace/kitchen-sink.html (switch to typescript mode in the left panel).

[relaxitup]

There's also this one based on node.js and Ace... There is a github and you can install on your own server.. I'm using it as a private interactive pastebin/code snippet editor etc on a vps of mine.. Just need to put an apache ssl reverse proxy with basic auth in front of it and I'll be good to go..

http://codeintune.com/

[pingec]

Tried the editor at http://www.typescriptlang.org/Playground/ and there is one very annoying thing. I cannot type the closing curly brace ("}") on a non-us keyboard layout (Alt Gr+ N). Other than that, it's good.

[ryanmolden]

I talked with someone internally that works on this, he said:

I can type { and } on a Swiss keyboard which is a AltGr + ä and AltGr + $.

What keyboard layout were you seeing issues with? Looking at Wikipedia it looks like it would be South Slavic Latin based on your mention of Alt Gr+N?

You can mail me privately if you wish (mail in profile).

[kaiwetzel]

The inline threaded comments look like an awesome feature, would be amazing to have an inline widget like that in Code Mirror. Submitting tiny local patches this way might be useful, too :D

[itsbits]

Editing is good and fine..but can i preview my changes directly??

[relaxitup]

The code editor does not appear to work at all for me with IE 8.

[meapix]

doesn't have vi mode

[no_gravity]

Any good online editors with vi mode out there?

[flagnog]

As Admiral Ackbar would say: "It's a trap!"

Unless you're committed to MS anyway.

[pedromorgan]

Great.. How even more script kiddies can practice...

[recursive]

Are you opposed to practicing?