Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Firepad, an open source collaborative text editor

firepad.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 65 posts

Re: Show HN: Firepad, an open source collaborative text editor

#31

Post by Y_Not »

mynmyn wrote: post #9
mikelehen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm biased, since I'm a Firebase dev, but honestly, Firebase is great for solving /all kinds/ of use cases. :-) We've had people build everything from emergency response simulations synchronized across multiple devices to iOS apps for grandparents to read books with their grandkids over long distances. Firebase is great any time you need real-time updates, collaboration, or you just want to get something up and runni…

Those sounds really interesting, thanks. Looking forward to seeing more of the real-time web evolve.

I definitely can see a use case for this if it had some type of integration with MS word.

Unfortunately I'm currently stuck working for the big corporation, and we have so many meetings reviewing documents, etc over fairly large teleconferences across the world-- so not face to face meetings. Currently, usually only one person drives the edits in MS Word and screenshares with the group via a WebEx or LiveMeeting... if there could be some sort integration with MS Word so multiple people could edit at the same time and view the same thing, there would be no need for the LiveMeeting/WebEx screenshare and the collaboration would be much more seamless. Would remind me of a SubEthaEdit mashed with MS Word.

Regardless, well done.

Re: Show HN: Firepad, an open source collaborative text editor

#32

Post by Jonovono »

Cool. I am going to check this out. I was planning to work on a document site like github but for non technical people (http://www.rubberdocky.com), but have put that on the back-burner for now. One of the projects I recently came across that I thought looked awesome was Substance (http://www.substance.io). I like the idea of collaborating on documents in a way like github but only more accessibly for anyone.

Re: Show HN: Firepad, an open source collaborative text editor

#33

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

mikelehen wrote: post #21
jfaucett wrote: post #20

okay, after working in this for a couple minutes I found it to be AWESOME!!! great job guys. Obviously, there's a ton of people on it right now, and the proverbial dicks just pasting 10101 all over to annoy, but in a team i could see how this would be really awesome. While working on it there was a short minute where the dicks let off and i really got to see how great this can be for teaming up to iteractively write…

Thanks! Glad you like it. You can also click the "Private Pad" link in the top right to get away from the chaos. :-)

Nitpick: It seems impossible to scroll down and read the stuff below the actual editor (at least in Chrome), since the editor keeps auto-scrolling me back up to itself whenever new data comes in.

Re: Show HN: Firepad, an open source collaborative text editor

#34

Post by deliminator »

dmbaggett wrote: post #7

Does anyone know of an HTML-friendly equivalent of this? I.e., something similar that allows pasting/editing HTML?

We are building a real time HTML synchronization engine at wikidocs.com (using a custom OT engine). It's still work in progress, but you can already try it out - if you fire up the inspector and manipulate the DOM, your changes will be synchronized automatically.

Re: Show HN: Firepad, an open source collaborative text editor

#36

Post by mikelehen »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #33
mikelehen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Glad you like it. You can also click the "Private Pad" link in the top right to get away from the chaos. :-)

Nitpick: It seems impossible to scroll down and read the stuff below the actual editor (at least in Chrome), since the editor keeps auto-scrolling me back up to itself whenever new data comes in.

Yeah, sorry! Codemirror automatically keeps your cursor scrolled into view and with lots of people editing, your cursor keeps moving.

I just tweaked it (again) so that we remove focus from CodeMirror when you scroll the page, so this should be taken care of.

Sorry about that!

Re: Show HN: Firepad, an open source collaborative text editor

#38

Post by mikelehen »

amasad wrote: post #37

Looks cool. It'd be great if you hide the firepad instance from the global scope, to make it harder for trolls to do: setInterval(function () {firepad.codeMirror_.setValue('foo'); }, 0);

Won't people realize that doing that would detract from the experience of other users?

Haha, just kidding! Moved everything into a closure. Thanks for suggesting it.

Re: Show HN: Firepad, an open source collaborative text editor

#39

Post by mccolin »

mikelehen wrote: post #10
mccolin wrote: post #4

Haven't looked into the code/docs deeply, yet, but would love to know if it can be customized to send data to one's own backend service for private implementations. Love the editor. Also had a few great laughs trying to use it alongside so many other people.

We built it as a Firebase app, but we're releasing it as open source and are looking forward to seeing what the community does with it. :-) All of the OT work happens client-side, so it's certainly possible to adapt it to other backends. Additionally, a lot of the OT code is based on ot.js[1], a fantastic open source OT implementation by Tim Baumann. He has a node.js backend as well as Haskell and Python. Of course t…

This is fantastic. Looked up some more information about your Firebase offerings and like what's going on there, too :-) Keep up the great work!

Re: Show HN: Firepad, an open source collaborative text editor

#40

Post by stephenhuey »

mayop100 wrote: post #24
Johnyma22 wrote: post #23

I think this is a really early stage Etherpad. Check out Etherpad's features if you can, you have your work cut out though http://etherpad.org

What features would you like to see implemented next in Firepad?

That's a good question, and I don't have an answer for you. However, since I've heard how awesome Firebase is, I'm wondering what you offer over Etherpad. After Google acquired it and open sourced the engine, lots of other websites have sprung up that use it. I'm sure there are great reasons to use your tool rather than an Etherpad-based one, so it'd be interesting to hear them!

http://etherpad.org/

http://piratepad.net/

http://titanpad.com/

http://www.cynapse.com/syncin

http://openetherpad.org/

Mozilla and no doubt many others can easily deploy it on their servers:

https://etherpad.mozilla.org/

Post reply on HN