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Web-based editor

docs.github.com

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Re: Web-based editor

#31

It seems we are moving to a world of magic, where developers will be alchemists, and only a handful of people will understand "physics" or "chemistry" and know what is actually going on in the cloud, serverless, fileless, functionless development. Since google translate and google maps, I always ask myself, what is the real price for this very convenient and engaging product.

I see this happening a lot with the young engineers. Very few of them really know what's happening under the hoods.

Re: Web-based editor

#32

It seems we are moving to a world of magic, where developers will be alchemists, and only a handful of people will understand "physics" or "chemistry" and know what is actually going on in the cloud, serverless, fileless, functionless development. Since google translate and google maps, I always ask myself, what is the real price for this very convenient and engaging product.

This is the nature of tools, specialization, and how industries mature. This is the evolution of software eating the world -- now it's also eating development itself.

Re: Web-based editor

#34
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An in-browser (neo)vim instance with a dotfiles repo integration would really be something.

Firenvim exists for in-browser neovim. I haven't used it. [0] https://github.com/glacambre/firenvim

I'm currently using firenvim (It's great!), but you need a local neovim instance for it to work.

I was thinking of something that would allow you to use any machine with a browser.

Re: Web-based editor

#35
I thought it was amazing when someone showed me 4 years ago that you can access RStudio feature complete in a browser. Data and compute lives air gapped on the server and the developers device is just a thin client.

Great to see other development tool picking up the same usecase.

Re: Web-based editor

#36

Am I alone in not jumping on the Visual Studio [Code] bandwagon? Other online editors have had "vim modes" for ages (e.g. Overleaf) and frankly I'm unlikely to write a chonking great script or project in a browser on Github -- a minor modification is much more likely. VS Code's codebase is huge . Will Github allow people to use other $EDITORs? (Yes, I'm aware this makes me sound like an old man!)

VSCode is/was a neat editor, but I fear it is slowly morphing to become an overloaded mess.

It was so sleek and lightweight at first it was really a pleasure to use. But performance and bugs seem to increase, even if you don't use many or any plugins at all.

Re: Web-based editor

#37

Remember the typical Microsoft: "embrace, extend, extinguish" ...

For those unaware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

> "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE) . . . is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.

This is a completely valid reason to be concerned with these sorts of things now that GitHub is owned and operated by Microsoft. They continue these practices today, and GitHub is no exception.

Re: Web-based editor

#38

It looks like this is actually just the editor from Visual Studio Online unless I've missed something. It's great, but if it were really Visual Studio Code that would be awesome and I'd be pleasantly surprised. (The difference being that if it's just the editor it misses out on all the compiler/analysis integrations. If Github were providing Linux containers in the cloud for working on projects - essentially the SSH…

I think what you might want is GitHub Codespaces?: https://github.com/features/codespaces. Was on HN recently too.

Re: Web-based editor

#39
Opens up some very attractive features for the developer. The amount of vendor lock-in that this will create over time is spectacular. Can we glean something of how the future of software development looks like? Thinking especially of open-source projects here.

Re: Web-based editor

#40
post #2

Its scary we're heading towards a situation where everything is done in a browser. Maybe Chromeos really is the future.

I used to think this was pushed by some of the large tech companies that do not have a popular OS and are forced to turn the browser effectively into an OS. But both Github and VS code are owned by Microsoft now.

Users in general (with exceptions) do not care about how and where their software runs and data is stored.

For many people internet connectivity and local computation power (within the browser) is now good enough to skip installations and updates all together.

It makes perfect sense for them to do this and in the end they are not giving up control if they still own the OS.

Microsoft can always the decide that "untrusted" websites (which, for example, are not "certified" by them) get blocked from using certain features.

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