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Show HN: Firepad, an open source collaborative text editor

firepad.io

41–50 of 65 posts

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

#41
This inspired me to create a simple page where people can update their status in real-time. It's similar to the firepad.io text editor, except you can only edit your own status and not that of others.

You can try it at https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8554242/live-status.html

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

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

The main reason you might want to use Firepad instead of Etherpad is if you don't want to run the server-side piece of Etherpad. For example, if you're stack is different than theirs it might be a pain to set up a special server environment just for the collaboration portion of your app.

Firepad is fully client-side code, so there's no server software for you to set up.

The other big reason you might use Firepad is to get all of the other goodies that Firebase provides, like the automatic scaling, Forge debugger, declarative security, etc.

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

#43
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.

Sure, now they'll need to do `cm = document.body.getElementsByClassName("CodeMirror")[0].CodeMirror` first.

(I.e. it's client-side, you can't prevent people from doing whatever they want.)

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

#44

I don't see how this could be used for collaborative code editing. Is there an example of this?

Yup! http://www.firepad.io/examples/#code Atlassian[1] and Action.io have already built stuff with it. 1. https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.stas...

cool thanks

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

#45
post #28

Seems a lot of people are forgetting about http://hackpad.com

Perhaps because hackpad isn't [edit: as gung-ho about being] open source (if they are at all)? I'm sure there are other commercial offerings too... like yours!

Only slightly, though; I mean, Firebase is built on a fully-proprietary platform (Firebase).

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

#46
post #45
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps because hackpad isn't [edit: as gung-ho about being] open source (if they are at all)? I'm sure there are other commercial offerings too... like yours!

Only slightly, though; I mean, Firebase is built on a fully-proprietary platform (Firebase).

I haven't looked at the code so I can't give you too much of a hard time (have you looked at it?) but the Firebase team might take issue with your use of the word 'slightly'.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5519094

  > All of the OT work happens client-side, so it's certainly 
  > possible to adapt it to other backends.

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

#49

Curious why each pad is limited to <18 users? Will firebase have a hard time syncing more than those users?

There's no limit. We had ~50 in some rooms earlier. We did shard users across dozens of rooms so that the user experience wasn't too ridiculous...

You could (if you like pain) use firepad with hundreds of users and it shouldn't be an issue. The actual messages being sent around are small.

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