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Re:GitLab Web IDE by ehsankia on Friday June 15, 2018 @04:25PM (#17323247)
Honestly I generally don't want to do my entire development on a Web IDE, but I do think it's very useful for a repo hosting site to have editing tools, as I often find myself wanting to fix something quick away from my setup.

Web IDEs in general are a great concept though, mostly because developers generally love having their editor customized the way they like it, and from there, having it in the cloud accessible from any computer is a huge win. That being said, it's hard to compete against the plugin model that Sublime/Atom/VSCode have.

Re:GitLab Web IDE by bartread on Friday June 15, 2018 @06:06PM (#17324036)
I've heard this a lot since around 2012/13 when I first became aware of C9, and even gave it a go. Granted it was and is impressive as a technical achievement, but I really don't see the use case at all, other than as something to use as a quick fix embedded by a repo host.

My laptop is a tool I use every single day and have with me almost all of the time. I do not need internet connectivity to remain productive, which is a huge boon to me when travelling. An IDE that requires constant, reliable connectivity to work is therefore of little use to me.

Re:GitLab Web IDE by RhodesianHunter on Friday June 15, 2018 @09:29PM (#17325224)
> other than as something to use as a quick fix embedded by a repo host

Which could very well be a determining feature in where people host or which Git provider they use.

Re:GitLab Web IDE by ehsankia on Sunday June 17, 2018 @07:07PM (#17334901)
Right, which is why I would love to see a browser that is both web-based and also offline. If either Sublime, VS Code or Atom get proper web-based support, that would be amazing. You can use your offline version on your computer, then jump to a web version when you're on a different computer, while still having all your settings and even extensions.
Re:GitLab Web IDE by inimino on Friday June 15, 2018 @11:39PM (#17325685)
There's no reason an online hosted Web IDE can't work perfectly well in an offline mode too. Offline-capable Web apps are essentially a solved problem.
Re:GitLab Web IDE by bartread on Saturday June 16, 2018 @07:26AM (#17326989)
> Offline-capable Web apps are essentially a solved problem.

That may be true in theory. In practice "essentially" is an awfully long way from "absolutely", with offline support in many apps being either choppy or non-existent. Even the venerable Google Docs is something of a ####show when used offline, to the point where I gave up and went back to Office 365.

Re:GitLab Web IDE by inimino on Saturday June 16, 2018 @09:12PM (#17330397)
True, but Google Docs is old and Google doesn't seem to care about offline, so I would blame Google not the tech for that one.
Re:GitLab Web IDE by ivan_burazin on Saturday June 16, 2018 @01:37PM (#17328394)
Web IDEs like ours (Codeanywhere) and C9 Have been around since before 2010...so we have been all around for a while. The Web IDE is a valid product and it has a use case (we have over 1.2M users), but not that all anticipated way back then.
Re:GitLab Web IDE by qaq on Friday June 15, 2018 @04:54PM (#17323483)
If it works OK from iPad might actually be pretty useful.
Re:GitLab Web IDE by ivan_burazin on Saturday June 16, 2018 @01:37PM (#17328396)
Codeanywhere has a iOS app!
Re:GitLab Web IDE by IshKebab on Friday June 15, 2018 @04:50PM (#17323442)
Yeah in theory it could be amazing for very irregular contributors - e.g. I see a small problem in a project that I think I can fix but I don't want to download the whole thing, set up the device environment, run a server and whatever.

Kind of like how you can already edit files and make a pull request in the GitHub web interface, but you can also run the program and check it works!

Re:GitLab Web IDE by seanp2k2 on Friday June 15, 2018 @06:41PM (#17324299)
Since Atom and VSCode are Electron-based, how hard would it be to make those run in an actual browser hosted on an actual site?
Re:GitLab Web IDE by mattnewton on Friday June 15, 2018 @07:01PM (#17324460)
I think that is part of what is happening here, since Monaco (what the editor in gitlab is built on) is the core for VScode
Re:GitLab Web IDE by IggleSniggle on Friday June 15, 2018 @08:11PM (#17324861)
Check out stackblitz
Re:GitLab Web IDE by sjellis on Saturday June 16, 2018 @03:04AM (#17326298)
Stackblitz is definitely one of the few Web IDEs that I think has potential, because it can access the VS Code ecosystem of plugins.
Re:GitLab Web IDE by fropy on Friday June 15, 2018 @07:08PM (#17324493)
The Monaco editor used in Gitlab is the editor and parent project for VSCode
Re:GitLab Web IDE by moron4hire on Friday June 15, 2018 @07:46PM (#17324739)
VSCode has been available for editing projects on Azure for quite some time
Re:GitLab Web IDE by colonelpopcorn on Saturday June 16, 2018 @01:05PM (#17328217)
Especially with plugins that can save your configuration to a server somewhere. Yeah, it takes longer than just booting up c9, but it's really not that much worse.
Re:GitLab Web IDE by sjellis on Saturday June 16, 2018 @03:13AM (#17326334)
> Web IDEs in general are a great concept though, mostly because developers generally love having their editor customized the way they like it, and from there, having it in the cloud accessible from any computer is a huge win. That being said, it's hard to compete against the plugin model that Sublime/Atom/VSCode have.

I've tried Cloud9, and found that the plugin issue was a killer. If a Web-based IDE can't use an existing ecosystem of add-ons then the developers have to implement linters, debuggers etc. for every language, as well as things like build tool support and version control integration. For this reason, Cloud9 doesn't actually have the functionality of an IDE or a programmer text editor, and I could not imagine asking professional developers to adopt it as their primary environment: it is closer to Notepad++ than VS Code.