Honestly I generally don't want to do my entire development on a Web IDE, but I do think it's very useful for a repo hosting site to have editing tools, as I often find myself wanting to fix something quick away from my setup.
Web IDEs in general are a great concept though, mostly because developers generally love having their editor customized the way they like it, and from there, having it in the cloud accessible from any computer is a huge win. That being said, it's hard to compete against the plugin model that Sublime/Atom/VSCode have.
I've heard this a lot since around 2012/13 when I first became aware of C9, and even gave it a go. Granted it was and is impressive as a technical achievement, but I really don't see the use case at all, other than as something to use as a quick fix embedded by a repo host.
My laptop is a tool I use every single day and have with me almost all of the time. I do not need internet connectivity to remain productive, which is a huge boon to me when travelling. An IDE that requires constant, reliable connectivity to work is therefore of little use to me.
Right, which is why I would love to see a browser that is both web-based and also offline. If either Sublime, VS Code or Atom get proper web-based support, that would be amazing. You can use your offline version on your computer, then jump to a web version when you're on a different computer, while still having all your settings and even extensions.
There's no reason an online hosted Web IDE can't work perfectly well in an offline mode too. Offline-capable Web apps are essentially a solved problem.
> Offline-capable Web apps are essentially a solved problem.
That may be true in theory. In practice "essentially" is an awfully long way from "absolutely", with offline support in many apps being either choppy or non-existent. Even the venerable Google Docs is something of a ####show when used offline, to the point where I gave up and went back to Office 365.
Web IDEs like ours (Codeanywhere) and C9 Have been around since before 2010...so we have been all around for a while. The Web IDE is a valid product and it has a use case (we have over 1.2M users), but not that all anticipated way back then.
Yeah in theory it could be amazing for very irregular contributors - e.g. I see a small problem in a project that I think I can fix but I don't want to download the whole thing, set up the device environment, run a server and whatever.
Kind of like how you can already edit files and make a pull request in the GitHub web interface, but you can also run the program and check it works!
Especially with plugins that can save your configuration to a server somewhere. Yeah, it takes longer than just booting up c9, but it's really not that much worse.
> Web IDEs in general are a great concept though, mostly because developers generally love having their editor customized the way they like it, and from there, having it in the cloud accessible from any computer is a huge win. That being said, it's hard to compete against the plugin model that Sublime/Atom/VSCode have.
I've tried Cloud9, and found that the plugin issue was a killer. If a Web-based IDE can't use an existing ecosystem of add-ons then the developers have to implement linters, debuggers etc. for every language, as well as things like build tool support and version control integration. For this reason, Cloud9 doesn't actually have the functionality of an IDE or a programmer text editor, and I could not imagine asking professional developers to adopt it as their primary environment: it is closer to Notepad++ than VS Code.
Web IDEs in general are a great concept though, mostly because developers generally love having their editor customized the way they like it, and from there, having it in the cloud accessible from any computer is a huge win. That being said, it's hard to compete against the plugin model that Sublime/Atom/VSCode have.