Comments on: Bespin: A new Mozilla Labs experimental extensible code editor using Canvas

By: skierpage

skierpage — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 06:54:04 +0000

Nifty, but I’m confused about “running” a project. When I click the [View in Browser] icon for any Sample project file, I get “Saved file: undefined”.

In the video around 11:25 you talk about turning a collaboration icon blue, but I think it’s cut off and invisible in the screen capture.

Ctrl-Z works, but not Ctrl-Y/X/C/V, nor the Firefox Edit menu; I filed bug 480252.

By: antimatter15

antimatter15 — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 23:51:23 +0000

Use the command line on the bottom.

@ywg, afik it’s not supported because Opera doesn’t have the text rendering for CANVAS

By: blueskiwi

blueskiwi — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 21:43:17 +0000

needs mouseover effects… so I know the buttons work

also… how do I open my own files or start a project? is that working in this demo yet?

By: samtoocan

samtoocan — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 17:25:17 +0000

Dion,

This is awesome!!! I am so surprised how fast it is as I was skeptical at first until I tried it. This is an auspicious sign of many good things to come, no wonder Microsoft was scared and refused to implement the canvas. I always had looked forward to the day when widgets can break out from the technical limits of the browser without using Flash or Silverlight… and this day has truly come. This is just awesome!

Sam

ps ‘tab’ key and ‘shift-tab’ at the moment does not indent or unindent a ‘block’ of selected text. I know this is not a Unix standard but we had this in Windows editors for so many years now, and KDE editors had just started implementing this feature.

By: nicrizzo

nicrizzo — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 10:18:06 +0000

It’s slow for me.
I’m working on a similar widget, no canvas :P (my biggest problem now is Internet Explorer…), but it provides code completion and a couple of interesting plugins.
I’d like to help (in my spare time), if you need a developer.

By: ywg

ywg — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 09:53:26 +0000

Detect and reject Opera for no apparent reason (Opera do support canvas)…

By: nazum

nazum — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 03:19:59 +0000

wow scrollbars! wow no lags while editing! wow no trees!

now seriously – I don’t see anything exciting about this the only benefit so far I can find according to the preview is ability to work with files from any computer but really, how often you change workspaces? and multiuser editing – there are plenty of editors or IDEs with such feature and well even on that tech-preview it seems to be a bit laggy while scrolling file even the only feature so far is syntax-highlting it’s really very poor on that stage and if they add more features it will sure decrease performance more to say it will always be slower than ‘normal’ editor/IDE.. what’s more – it uses canvas and for me it’s like reinventing the wheel

so.. of course this project is on early stage but I don’t think many ppl will choose it as their main editor for many reasons

By: ThomasHansen

ThomasHansen — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:53:30 +0000

OMG Dion and Ben, this is truly a *really* great thing, this just blew my feet away :)))
.
Congratulations guys :)))
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This is gonna *change* things … ;)

By: Montago

Montago — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:21:11 +0000

/We have all seen enhanced textarea and div code editors, and while some have done a great job with them, they often seem to fall down in performance with large files and have strange bugs that make them more of a toy than you would like./

so i guess my editor : http://mdk2002.dyndns.org/MDKEditor/Editor is just a x-browser toy ;-)

the only reason why its not perfect, is because we who work on it have jobs and stuff to do…

when it comes to editing large files, youll still need to carefully implement the parser and runtimes in order to make it fast… that goes fo any editor out there – even native editors…

Bespin looks awesome btw…

By: rektide

rektide — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 02:20:57 +0000

Seems like an extremely superfluous use of . Theres a number of html forms text editors out there, and any one of them would’ve made a far better choice than building your own graphics stack. CodeMirror, CodePress, EditArea….

I’m on the dev repository/channel of Chrome and it runs really slow and looks sin awful. I’ll try webkit nightly and Opera next. Still, I’d prefer a solution such as CodeMirror which will run on almost anything.

By: velkymx

velkymx — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 00:27:04 +0000

Interesting idea, but still nowhere close to something like notepad++

By: theaub

theaub — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:14:44 +0000

Nice work, gents. I gotta say, though, the look reminds me a little bit of obsessing.org…. ;-)

By: Ben Galbraith

Ben Galbraith — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 19:49:45 +0000

@WebReflection: We’d love for you to start submitting patches! :-)

@roryok: Thanks for the feedback, we definitely need to do better with tab handling.

@Spocke: To be honest, this caught us a bit flat-footed. We were running the app with elevated privileges for most of the cycle (which enabled us to use XUL clipboard APIs) and close to launch we realized getting copy/paste to work out of a privileged environment wouldn’t make it in time for the initial launch. We’ll get it fixed.

@igitur: Sorry about that.

@Remi and @kb0: Bespin definitely isn’t for everyone, and we definitely have more tools coming than just Bespin. But, we’re also pretty jazzed about what Bespin makes possible. Stay tuned and let us know if we ever move your needle.

@dgavey and @Nosredna: We have some ideas for how to get it working in IE–hopefully we’re able to try some of them out soon. :-)

@pcolton: Thanks very much Paul, very much looking forward to collaborating with you guys on this.

@cwolves: http://hg.mozilla.org/labs/bespin, my friend

@WillPeavy: Completely agree on both counts.

By: Ben Galbraith

Ben Galbraith — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 19:42:41 +0000

@ThomasF: Sorry, we didn’t spend enough time testing it on Linux before launch. It generally works really fast on OS X and Windows.

By: WillPeavy

WillPeavy — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:39:20 +0000

Great work so far! I just tried it out and really like this idea.
.
Feature requests: it would be cool to have a horizontal list of files for the current project in the top bar, instead of having to go back to the dashboard to switch between documents. … Also, word wrap would be a welcome addition.

By: cwolves

cwolves — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:17:25 +0000

Are there any plans to make this open source? I mean you can’t exactly keep the source closed seeing as how it’s a JS app, but I think you know what I mean :)

If so, it would be great to be able to install this on multiple servers to get real web-based editing on projects (as opposed to having this all on your site).

Or… Any plans to create a file read/write/browse API that this can hook into? So I can browse files on my server securely?

And please let me know if you need any help. I was the lead UX developer on zembly.com for the past year and we did something fairly similar, albeit using the browser’s WYSIWYG modes and all the associated headaches coming with that.

By: Nosredna

Nosredna — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:27:05 +0000

>>Wow, now if IE would get with the times an implement Canvas, we would have a real revolution on our hands.

They’ve said no for IE8. Perhaps IE9. Or IE10. Or IE11. They really don’t seem interested.

Perhaps they expect you to have two versions of your website. A normal one and a Silverlight one.

By: dgavey

dgavey — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:07:31 +0000

Wow, now if IE would get with the times an implement Canvas, we would have a real revolution on our hands.

Amazing work, I’m so glad you guys aren’t shackled by the confines of the google borg anymore.

By: iliad

iliad — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:59:25 +0000

This is really amazing! I’m gonna check this baby out right now!

By: kb0

kb0 — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:53:23 +0000

I agree with Remi. Interesting idea but I don’t find it useful for how I develop. I’m usually ssh’d into a server using vi.. where I save my changes, alt-tab to browser and refresh to see my changes. I don’t see a benefit to having a web-based editor for normal development. But I would be interested in hearing how others plan on using this.