What else do you like about them?
If you like vim or emacs - the Cons seem to far outweigh the one Pro that I can see for these types of editors:
- Online only.
- Client and service back-end usually not open source.
- Far less robust, feature-wise.
- Limited to using these for languages that their back-end supports.
- Limited by browser technology. For instance:
Can I break those tabs out to a new window?
How well does that perform?
Can I middle-click a document-tab to close it?
Does it integrate well with the rest of the
programs running on my operating system?
Personally I would use it - and even if it had only a fraction of functionality I mentioned - for remote pair programming. It's so hard to make people feel comfortable with Emacs/Vim+screen/tmux!
As an aside, I think that an online editor with scripting capability would quickly catch up to native editors in terms of features.
> - rectangular selection and operations (v: Ctrl-v, e: C-x r ... or rect-mark)
Ace (cloud9 editor which friendCode uses) have pretty good support for sublime text style multiple selections, (with ctrl-alt-arrow keys) so emacs or vim style should be easy to implement. The main problem is that there are oly a few people who use online editors, so most of this things are not implemented yet.
Also, regardless of scripting abilities, online editors are still limited to the abilities of the browser.
- Easy setup and update (all you need to do is signup) (good for beginners) - Realtime remote pair programming - You no longer need to setup execution environments on your computer locally.
We're definitely far from perfect. However I do think that there's interesting things to do with cloud based solutions, so that's what we're trying to do.
All feedback, for improvements are welcomed.
A pre-setup environment can be nice if it offers the amount of control that is necessary to accomplish the developer's goals.
My totally unqualified opinion on your venture is that you can be successful if you pursue partnerships with places like Heroku et. al. as well as offering it as a stand-alone service. Good luck!
There are quite a few advantages to cloud based solutions, a major one being "simplicity", by that I mean that they're easy to setup and manage (zero hassle for beginners).
I don't want to sound like I'm saying the product is a bad idea or that what we have now is sufficient and we don't need new things. I'm honestly very used to these features and they make me more productive; if I was a hobbyist, I could switch to less featureful editor right now, but for a professional your productivity determines your income for the large part. So, while I like the idea of in-browser editors, I cannot use them unless they have the features I need. If they are in different places then ok, but not if they are lacking.