19 ms·

GitLab Web IDE

776 points by Shinkirou 8y ago

erikb 8y ago
Gitlab is an awesome data center load tester, the only thing that's missing is a good github alternative. ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7978048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7978048
- qaq 8y ago
  How long until the email client is also part of Gitlab?
  - aldanor 8y ago
    And a slideshow editor. Plus commercial support for Visual Basic!
  - ezekg 8y ago
    Honestly, I bet they'll do a chat system next to try and replace Slack. One that comes with a @gitlabot which triggers CI/CD using DMs and hashtags.
    - jorisd 8y ago
      You're probably not far off; they acquired Gitter a little over a year ago: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/
      - ezekg 8y ago
        Wow I completely forgot about that! When is it too much? Personally, I like tools that do one thing well. But to each their own.
    - JetSpiegel 8y ago
      Mattermost is already integrated. It comes disabled by default, and it's not very easy to configure, but it's there already.
itwy 8y ago
So this is like Cloud9?
- brentjanderson 8y ago
  Vaguely - think GitHub file editing, but far more powerful. Some differences would include: * No terminal * No development environment to speak of, either (e.g. no libraries or binaries installed) The post identifies that this was developed as a way to include multiple file edits in one commit. GitHub, by contrast, applies a commit per file edit, so if you want to change three files, you would open each file separately and each edit/save would become a separate commit. I do think that this nudges GitLab as a platform a little closer to being like Cloud9 though!
  - jghefner 8y ago
    They do say that this is only the first version and that they have more features planned, including a live testing environment.
    - dimitrieh 8y ago
      Thanks, exactly this! Stay tuned!
Rickasaurus 8y ago
If I were them I might try to integrate with some existing open source plugin system (Atom or VSCode?) to get more supported languages for free.
- givehimagun 8y ago
  Wait a second - that's what they did? They picked Monaco which is the code editor for VSCode. They also referenced in the article how they stuck with similar UX as Atom and VSCode as well.
- Guillaume86 8y ago
  They use the monaco editor which is the editor from VS code so it's probably not far away.
- reificator 8y ago
  If it's Monaco then they're already doing that, as that's the core piece of VSCode.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
beat 8y ago
I'd love to see a point-by-point comparison with Cloud9. What each does, and what it doesn't do.
- freehunter 8y ago
  One big point of differentiation is Cloud9 runs your whole dev environment, you can run the code on the same server you write it on. It seems GitLab's solution doesn't offer that (yet).
  - beat 8y ago
    Yeah, I suspected that. On the other hand, Cloud9 can get expensive if you're keeping a dev environment hanging around.
hilyen 8y ago
The biggest problem I've had with all web ides is that you cannot use addons.
dillonb 8y ago
But does it have Vim keybindings?
- tcfunk 8y ago
  Asking the important questions.
  - jay-anderson 8y ago
    While it may not have been a serious question, vim key bindings (or emacs or whatever) are important to many people. You spend so much of your time in your editor/ide and become expert in it. Learning to work in another one is painful before you're properly productive again.
    - hessart 8y ago
      Seriously, how hard can it be? It's not like it's a completely new form of interaction. Vim and emacs are the ones that are exceptions in regard to UX.
      - adtac 8y ago
        I use qutebrowser (has vim-bindings), sway wm (I've customised it to have vim-bindings), zsh (with vim-bindings), weechat (with vim-bindings), mutt (still getting started with mutt, but it has vim-bindings too), and vim itself. These are pretty much the only pieces of software I interact with, so you can imagine how central vi/vim-bindings are in my life.
      - sirclueless 8y ago
        The basics are easy. A rudimentary normal mode with HJKL for movement is not hard. Block-select, sensible paragraph hops, copy/paste registers, repeatable macros, etc. is much harder to get right, and rough corners there can be a deal-breaker. Vim is a lot more than moving a cursor with your right hand.
- voxadam 8y ago
MajorSauce 8y ago
Add a dark theme and we are talking!
- aldanor 8y ago
  There is a dark theme.
  - tantalic 8y ago
    We are talking
  - mch82 8y ago
    Available in Community Edition? Any chance you have a link to instructions for activating it?
- dimitrieh 8y ago
  Interesting! Please, open an issue if you're interested!
- jobvandervoort 8y ago
  August 22nd: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/46334 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/46334
rootlocus 8y ago
It's a pretty editor, but it's not an IDE. No build tools, no debugging, no navigation, no refactoring, etc.
- sdesol 8y ago
  I'm guessing IDE is more off a signal of intent for now.
- TooBrokeToBeg 8y ago
  Integrated with Git/Gitlab.
  - bhhaskin 8y ago
    Right, but so does Atom. Atom is a text editor, not an IDE.
    - RussianCow 8y ago
      The line is pretty blurry these days. If you install enough extensions, it's very difficult to differentiate between Atom/VS Code and a "real" IDE.
      - em3rgent0rdr 8y ago
        Even vim can be made to function as an IDE.
    - romanr 8y ago
      As popular classic saying goes; If you have to create a project to save a file then it’s an IDE.
- dimitrieh 8y ago
  We are hard at work! Time and iterations are needed. A lot is coming your way, it is a very exciting project!
cabaalis 8y ago
I'll admit I'm a very poor "look and feel" person. But am I the only one who thinks that the zooming images on this webpage are hostile to the user? (1) The zoom animation takes too long, I want to see the screenshot (2) After zooming, it's still difficult to read to my 33-year-old eyes. I want a fullscreen image. (3) After finishing squinting at the screenshot, I scroll down to read more text only to have that text MOVE while I'm reading it as the screenshots animate back to their original positions.
- Operyl 8y ago
  It’s really bad on mobile, it literally just barely moves the screen shots around. I just have to view the image directly to get what I wanted out of it.
- rootlocus 8y ago
  I managed to bug an animation by scrolling too fast over it. One screenshot kept snapping back and forward 10 pixels really fast. I always feel like I'm not part of the demographic for these presentation pages.
  - tschwimmer 8y ago
    I think it's just bugged. Was doing the exact same thing for me too.
- magic_beans 8y ago
  My god it gave me a headache. I'm sure a designer thought it was too cool to resist.
- BinaryIdiot 8y ago
  Yes! I thought it was broken at first with how the "zoom" worked. It's very unusable.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Yup, this is very bad. That said, I find all JS-based "zooming" of images bad. The simplest behaviour is the best here - just make the thumbnail a link to raw image directly. If you absolutely have to have that JS-based gallery, then for goodness' sake, don't do it with CSS background shenanigans - use the <img> tag, so that "right click + view image" works. (To be fair to Gitlab, in this article "view image" works, and can be used to see images in full resolution.) Alas, I'm pretty sure that half of this breakage are designers cargo-culting trends instead of focusing on usability; the other half is user-hostile designs purposefully making it harder for regular users to get to the URL of the actual image.
ssijak 8y ago
What is the use for this? I mean how many people actually use such tools for actual day to day dev? Maybe for some quick edit if you don`t have laptop/computer at hand, but otherwise I see no real advantage of this.
- kossae 8y ago
  I'm asking the same question. We use GitLab at work, and the amount of bloat being added to this piece of software is becoming ridiculous. While I'm sure 'Auto-Devops' and other tools have their place at larger organizations, I'm struggling to find any real use case for a WebIDE that wouldn't be satisfied (and to a much better extent) by any of the other cloud IDE providers (see: Cloud9, etc.).
- Dayshine 8y ago
  I have several repos of text-file based validators that members of the public contribute to. They don't understand git, so it's handy to be able to edit on the website. Git has a super high learning curve for simple edits...
  - slrz 8y ago
    GitLab always had a simple editor that you can use to make commits from the web interface. The Web IDE thing is something more sophisticated.
  - dimitrieh 8y ago
    It's one of the problems we are trying to solve. Git is hard, so a guided experience can prove valuable. See for more information https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/47307 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/47307 and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/46122 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/46122 for example in how we are improving this starting with 11.1
  - chiefalchemist 8y ago
    The irony that Git was instrumental in the evolution to GUI-based computing, but didn't also make that same jump to lightspeed has always dumbfounded me. Git, like God, is good :) But even, over time, God has evolved and gotten more accessible.
zachlatta 8y ago
Wow, very cool. Lots of new players in this space: https://repl.it https://repl.it, https://glitch.me https://glitch.me, and now GitLab (and I'd be surprised if GitHub doesn't follow in tow). Cloud9's acquisition really left a big hole in the market. AFAIK there's still nothing out there that gives you a decent code editor (edit multiple files, have multiple tabs open, etc) that also gives you access to a Linux shell and ability to expose ports like Cloud9 did. Personally I'm most optimistic for https://repl.it https://repl.it. They already have a core userbase in high school classrooms and have been adding a ton of support for serverside applications to make it more appealing outside of the classroom.
- m6g6a 8y ago
  soon or later, i think github will introduce an ide based on the https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor
- int0x80 8y ago
  Ok. One question that bothers me. Why repl.it and company permit internet access through their sandboxes? How is that not restricted? I can just annonymously run stuff and use them as a proxy. That is a big no-no in my book, but I must be missing something.
  - ezekg 8y ago
    They're the only online repl I can use to test API integrations (and produce interactive integration examples), so I think of it as a "feature." ;)
    - amasad 8y ago
      Ah cool. Do you have any examples online of how you use it?
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
client4 8y ago
If multiple users could use the "IDE" at the same time I could move entirely off of GSuite. Right now being able to edit the occasional code block with 4 people watching is worth GDocs.
- tills13 8y ago
  You could use VSCode Live Share...
  - evv 8y ago
    Almost all of VSCode is open source, but live share is not.. On their website I noticed that they intend to provide generous 'free plans' of live share, which is a big hint about how Microsoft intends to monetize their open source products. In any case, I see a lot of value for the IDE to be integrated into your git host, so I think this is a great step for GitLab.
  - Bellyache5 8y ago
    Or Atom’s Teletype plugin.
hn_user123 8y ago
Thank you , this is very helpful
madmulita 8y ago
I wonder what happend to the integration with Koding, the docs I can find only state that it's been deprecated. Seemed like a nice marriage.
dominotw 8y ago
I think they are spreading themselves too thin working on way too many features. Feature envy with github is not a good way to define your roadmap. They should drop everything and focus the most important feature: speed.
- exikyut 8y ago
  DARPA created a 1THz transistor four years ago. It's the fastest single transistor in existence. You could say... it focuses on speed, to the exclusion of all other features!
qop 8y ago
I'd love to see more symbiosis between editors and deployment tools. I could write my code and tests in the browser editor, and just have a dashboard with everything I need to know. Then when I'm at home I can use my editor and still hack the old fashioned way. I wish Microsoft has bought gitlab instead of github. They could have this new editor tie in with azure or something cool like that. Like websharper, but for everybody else.
- shayac2 8y ago
  Gitlab is using Monaco for this. An open sourced online editor brought to you by none other than Microsoft. (https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor) I couldn't dig it up now but I recall seeing that Microsoft started this project as an online code editor for Azure, later using it in VSCode. So it would not be surprising if they bring this to github some time in the future.
  - qop 8y ago
    I'm well aware of monaco. I doubt something like what gitlab is building will come to github. Maybe a quick edit editor, but nothing more. Gitlab is going to integrate this to gitlab's CICD infra. If github gets one, it'll be a shitty typo fixer, that's it.
  - ivan_burazin 8y ago
    It still is "alive" somewhere in Azure but MS scrapped it really and focused making the best possible Desktop Editor. You wont see a web editor form them soon.
shayac2 8y ago
Ironic how they have Microsoft to thank for open-sourcing Monaco
pomber 8y ago
> We are planning for an even better experience in the future: one where we can integrate and support more advanced features, such as a live environment to test your code against This. Please. I'm playing with a similar concept for GitHub: https://twitter.com/pomber/status/1003416752146075648 https://twitter.com/pomber/status/1003416752146075648
- tootie 8y ago
  One day, I can toss out all my expensive hardware and do my job with a hi-res Chromebook and steady wifi.
  - freehunter 8y ago
    Depending on your job, you might be able to. All of my webdev is done using remote servers, I go back and forth between Cloud9 and Vim+EC2. I don't even have any locally-installed dev tools, and with Vim I can use my phone or tablet in a pinch. That setup doesn't work for everything, but it's great for some use cases.
    - ezekg 8y ago
      Using Vim from a phone or tablet sounds like a nightmare, tbh. I can barely text without typos.
      - swiley 8y ago
        Vim is actually pretty usable on a phone, my problem with it is that phones just feel like toys and so I have a hard time with putting myself in the right mood to do anything useful
        hestefisk 8y ago
        You could connect a Bluetooth keyboard to the phone and it would make a decent terminal emulator :)
  - 8y ago
upbeatlinux 8y ago
Hmm, at one point wasn't there a tight integration between Koding and GitLab? Or at least an attempt to make the tools more cooperative? In fact a Koding acquisition by GitLab seemed like a no brainer. FWIW ~2012-2013 there was Cloud9, Koding and Nitrous. Now that Nitrous is defunct and Cloud9 was acquired I'm not sure what fills the void. Put differently is there a void to fill? Is there an actual demand for web IDE's? Or is this just bling?
- exsilium 8y ago
  If you are looking for a self-host solution, you can still use the [GPL version of Cloud9 v2](https://github.com/exsilium/cloud9 https://github.com/exsilium/cloud9). All contributions to the project are warmly welcome.
- staz 8y ago
  That was their plan but it didn't work out, they talked about it here https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/04/devops-strategy/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/04/devops-strategy/ (it's quite an interesting article in general) > And to be honest, it was what we were hoping that Koding would have provided for us, and we have an integration with them, but it hasn’t worked out, really, the way that we had hoped. And so, we’re looking at alternatives, and we think we can probably do this ourselves.
nik736 8y ago
They have far more important things to focus on, I wonder why they waste so much time for such a useless feature.
- bdcravens 8y ago
  You could argue the same about their CI/CD features. I don't necessarily consider this a useless feature. I've edited files live on Github (usually things that are safe to edit, like READMEs) and I wouldn't mind the editor being a bit more feature-rich.
bitL 8y ago
GitLab is slowly on its way to compete with Microsoft, Google, JetBrains... I hope you guys create your own programming language as well to become a real software company ;-) Good luck!
- welly 8y ago
  What are they now if not a "real software company"?
  - bitL 8y ago
    OK. I meant a Tier #1 admired software company ;-) Own language is a must to earn admiration of developers :)
- sytse 8y ago
  Thanks! One of our sub-values is boring solutions https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#efficiency https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#efficiency So I don't think we'll be creating a programming language soon. I'm following crystal https://crystal-lang.org/ https://crystal-lang.org/ with interest. And one of our team members is making one in a private capacity https://gitlab.com/yorickpeterse/inko https://gitlab.com/yorickpeterse/inko
  - bitL 8y ago
    Cool! You never know - AFAIK Kotlin first started as an individual project as well. I'll keep an eye on you ;-)
- sverhagen 8y ago
  I admire Gitlab in all sorts of ways, but in the context of IDEs, they're no JetBrains yet. Their IDE is unsurpassed for Java folks. I tried to stick with Eclipse as long as I could, but IntelliJ keeps adding amazing features at a breakneck speed. Admittedly, Java is a very IDE heavy language, umm, "culturally" (while I've seen people doing Python or JavaScript in other editors like vim, for Java that seems hardly ever the case). Maybe this whole online IDE thing is just not aimed at is Java folks? (Like... How would I do TDD?)
adamrezich 8y ago
Anyone remember back when Heroku had something sort of like a primitive version of this? Whatever happened to that? I spent many a high school lunch break in the library teaching myself how to make Rails apps using it
fladd 8y ago
Looks interesting, but it has the same bug as the normal file editing in Gitlab. As soon as I click on edit, the syntax highlighting (no matter what theme I have selected) changes to something completely different.
hippich 8y ago
I wonder if VSC could be used as a library to render editor in the browser.
- c17r 8y ago
  They are using the Monaco editor which is the basis for VSC
bluedino 8y ago
I have been dreaming about something like this since the first time I went from notepad/ftp/netscape
NVRM 8y ago
© 2018 Microsoft
safwan 8y ago
I think Janitor seems similar! https://janitor.technology/ https://janitor.technology/
ryenus 8y ago
Sourcegraph used to be an online vscode, simply the coolest back then, but seems no more, they suddenly changed direction, possibly due to conflict of interests with Microsoft?
- sqs 8y ago
  Sourcegraph CEO here. VS Code is great for editing, but Sourcegraph is code search/browsing. So we switched to using a read-only code view that loads super fast on the web. It has basically all the same features as before: https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/gorilla/websocket/-/blob/conn.go#L281 https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/gorilla/websocket/-/blob/... has code intelligence hovers, Git blame, symbols, etc. What features do you miss?
hestefisk 8y ago
I could see a use case for vi style keybindings on top of Monaco.
akulbe 8y ago
A couple questions. Is there any way to change the font size in the Web IDE? Is there a dark mode? Thank you for this!
paradite 8y ago
I have been using GitLab IDE in the past few months for documentation updates and it has been great. Whenever I see an outdated doc in the repo, I just click edit on the markdown file. It provides markdown preview and automatically creates patch-n branch and merge request for me without the need to touch my terminal. Super convenient.
Kamshak 8y ago
I feel like StackBlitz beats all other Web IDEs since it's pretty much just VSCode in the Browser. The only one where TS code completion works and they can offer it very cheaply since the tech is so great that they don't even need to run a server to bundle anything. Just great! ATM it's only good for frontend apps though. My dream would be a combination of Cloud9 and the StackBlitz editor.
abtinf 8y ago
At first I was excited about this. Then I tried it. There is no working set. Reloading the web page loses all changes. This would have been a nice path to bring less technical folks into gitlab, say for writing articles and other copy. But I can already imagine the non-stop complaints about losing work.
- exikyut 8y ago
  Well, that shouldn't be very hard to solve; at the worst save the "working set" in a UI-specific cache (aka detached from the git repo), and maybe offer options for autosaving into branches. I do agree this is something that needs to be solved, but cannot categorically be solved elegantly, so GitLab needs to just get on with just doing what will work.
sverhagen 8y ago
How does a Java developer do TDD in an online IDE?
- mch82 8y ago
  One way is to use the CI Pipeline feature of GitLab. When you commit your code, run it though a build stage (if necessary) and then a test stage. Any tests that output an error will cause the test stage of the CI Pipeline to fail. I set up a simple proof of concept [1]. My goal is to complete the "Your First RPM Package" tutorial [2] using Web IDE from a iPad 6th Gen. [3] is the resulting CI Pipeline. I recognize this is nowhere near a "real" project (and hadn't ever planned to really share or use it). Maybe someone else has a more complete example? Edit: Since you mentioned Java development, it might be worth reading through the answers to the Stack Overflow question "How to use GitLab CI to build a Java Maven project?" [4]. [1]: https://gitlab.com/mchogan/iPad-experiment/tree/mchogan-master-patch-25358 https://gitlab.com/mchogan/iPad-experiment/tree/mchogan-mast... [2]: https://rpm-packaging-guide.github.io/#hello-world https://rpm-packaging-guide.github.io/#hello-world "Your First RPM Package" [3]: https://gitlab.com/mchogan/iPad-experiment/pipelines/22777931 https://gitlab.com/mchogan/iPad-experiment/pipelines/2277793... [4]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/33430487/3877908 https://stackoverflow.com/q/33430487/3877908 "How to use GitLab CI to build a Java Maven project?"
snurk 8y ago
I wish GitLab would take whatever resources this has and put them all on site reliability. They have a ton of open positions listed, but none are for Site Reliability Engineer. Frequent slow requests and 5xx errors keep me from giving GitLab a real try.
- sytse 8y ago
  Getting GitLab.com reliable is a top priority. We are hiring multiple SREs and https://jobs.lever.co/gitlab/a9ec2996-b7b6-4d87-aed0-1fc2ce3f8faa https://jobs.lever.co/gitlab/a9ec2996-b7b6-4d87-aed0-1fc2ce3... is on our jobs page.
- erikb 8y ago
  You can't have a gazillion features and be stable. I think it's quite clear which direction Gitlab is going.
- golergka 8y ago
  And performance. I migrated our project from Gitlab to Githab exactly because of how excruciatingly slow PR workflow was (serialized game assets routinely have changesets in tens of thousands of lines).
  - philipwhiuk 8y ago
    Git-fat/GFS and treating assets as binary would seem to be the solution here. There's no way you can review tens of thousands of lines.
    - golergka 8y ago
      When they're in tens of thousands, no. But quite often files of the same format, and even the same files have just a couple of changes that are definitely reviewable.
sbose78 8y ago
Good job! This looks like a great code/text editor than an IDE at the moment. You would need some sort of code navigation, debug and run capabilities to call it an IDE :) Hope to see more soon? Redhat's OpenShift.io Eclipse Che integration would be a good example of a cloud IDE where you can could code,build and debug off a web-browser backed by a container-based workspace running on Kubernetes.
- mch82 8y ago
  If Web IDE follows in the footsteps of other GitLab features, then it'll catch up soon!
searover 8y ago
good
abc_lisper 8y ago
Why are people building these verticals? What happened to Unix philosophy? Build tools that do simple things, and make composition do the work for you. I don't see why anyone needs an online IDE. Much less one interfaced with Gitlab. What next, invent a new cpu too?
- yoz-y 8y ago
  Unix philosophy does not work on the web because even with all the talk about micro services, you can not easily chain or combine web tools together.
  - abc_lisper 8y ago
    But why write code on the web? If you are typing you are already on a computer
    - kylestlb 8y ago
      I hear you. I'm sure a lot of other people lurking here agree as well.
    - jakelazaroff 8y ago
      Conversely, if all you need is a web IDE that abstracts individual tools away, why bother dealing with them? Setting up and maintaining a development environment environment is at best annoying and at worst daunting, especially if you're a beginner.
    - closeparen 8y ago
      Lots of companies do their development work on per-developer remote VMs, especially for resource-intensive applications that need nontrivial configuration-management setup for databases, message queues, etc. that they depend on. Currently your choices are emacs/vim over SSH or sync from your local machine (where the code intelligence / debugging integration probably doesn't work as desired). A web IDE allows an arbitrarily powerful cloud instance to do the heavy lifting of build/test/code intelligence while the developer still gets a full-featured GUI IDE. Especially since VS Code and Atom are Electron apps, it's a natural step to use them to edit remote files. Better than VNC, anyway.
truth_seeker 8y ago
Very nice. Looks like Gitlab is getting better and better at everything devs desire.
amelius 8y ago
It seems that one group of developers wants to decentralize everything, while another group wants to centralize everything. ... Why?
- ckocagil 8y ago
  Decentralize for privacy and anti-censorship, centralize for convenience (collaboration, sharing, zero management, continue working where you left off on another device, ...)
  - amelius 8y ago
    Yeah, but we can have all the advantages you mentioned for a centralized system, while using a decentralized system. Also, centralization is against the Unix philosophy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
TabTwo 8y ago
Has GitLab already been bought by Apple?
- exikyut 8y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if Apple quietly uses them internally. 100k companies with a horizontal app like this (and "source code management" is pretty horizontal in any vaguely tech-incorporating industry) probably includes all the big names.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
enesunal 8y ago
I guess online vs-code for github will be available soon.
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776 points by Shinkirou 8y ago

Gitlab is an awesome data center load tester, the only thing that's missing is a good github alternative. ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7978048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7978048

qaq 8y ago
How long until the email client is also part of Gitlab?
- aldanor 8y ago
  And a slideshow editor. Plus commercial support for Visual Basic!
- ezekg 8y ago
  Honestly, I bet they'll do a chat system next to try and replace Slack. One that comes with a @gitlabot which triggers CI/CD using DMs and hashtags.
  - jorisd 8y ago
    You're probably not far off; they acquired Gitter a little over a year ago: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/
    - ezekg 8y ago
      Wow I completely forgot about that! When is it too much? Personally, I like tools that do one thing well. But to each their own.
  - JetSpiegel 8y ago
    Mattermost is already integrated. It comes disabled by default, and it's not very easy to configure, but it's there already.

itwy 8y ago

So this is like Cloud9?

brentjanderson 8y ago
Vaguely - think GitHub file editing, but far more powerful. Some differences would include: * No terminal * No development environment to speak of, either (e.g. no libraries or binaries installed) The post identifies that this was developed as a way to include multiple file edits in one commit. GitHub, by contrast, applies a commit per file edit, so if you want to change three files, you would open each file separately and each edit/save would become a separate commit. I do think that this nudges GitLab as a platform a little closer to being like Cloud9 though!
- jghefner 8y ago
  They do say that this is only the first version and that they have more features planned, including a live testing environment.
  - dimitrieh 8y ago
    Thanks, exactly this! Stay tuned!

Rickasaurus 8y ago

If I were them I might try to integrate with some existing open source plugin system (Atom or VSCode?) to get more supported languages for free.

givehimagun 8y ago
Wait a second - that's what they did? They picked Monaco which is the code editor for VSCode. They also referenced in the article how they stuck with similar UX as Atom and VSCode as well.
Guillaume86 8y ago
They use the monaco editor which is the editor from VS code so it's probably not far away.
reificator 8y ago
If it's Monaco then they're already doing that, as that's the core piece of VSCode.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

beat 8y ago

I'd love to see a point-by-point comparison with Cloud9. What each does, and what it doesn't do.

freehunter 8y ago
One big point of differentiation is Cloud9 runs your whole dev environment, you can run the code on the same server you write it on. It seems GitLab's solution doesn't offer that (yet).
- beat 8y ago
  Yeah, I suspected that. On the other hand, Cloud9 can get expensive if you're keeping a dev environment hanging around.

hilyen 8y ago

The biggest problem I've had with all web ides is that you cannot use addons.

dillonb 8y ago

But does it have Vim keybindings?

tcfunk 8y ago
Asking the important questions.
- jay-anderson 8y ago
  While it may not have been a serious question, vim key bindings (or emacs or whatever) are important to many people. You spend so much of your time in your editor/ide and become expert in it. Learning to work in another one is painful before you're properly productive again.
  - hessart 8y ago
    Seriously, how hard can it be? It's not like it's a completely new form of interaction. Vim and emacs are the ones that are exceptions in regard to UX.
    - adtac 8y ago
      I use qutebrowser (has vim-bindings), sway wm (I've customised it to have vim-bindings), zsh (with vim-bindings), weechat (with vim-bindings), mutt (still getting started with mutt, but it has vim-bindings too), and vim itself. These are pretty much the only pieces of software I interact with, so you can imagine how central vi/vim-bindings are in my life.
    - sirclueless 8y ago
      The basics are easy. A rudimentary normal mode with HJKL for movement is not hard. Block-select, sensible paragraph hops, copy/paste registers, repeatable macros, etc. is much harder to get right, and rough corners there can be a deal-breaker. Vim is a lot more than moving a cursor with your right hand.
voxadam 8y ago

MajorSauce 8y ago

Add a dark theme and we are talking!

aldanor 8y ago
There is a dark theme.
- tantalic 8y ago
  We are talking
- mch82 8y ago
  Available in Community Edition? Any chance you have a link to instructions for activating it?
dimitrieh 8y ago
Interesting! Please, open an issue if you're interested!
jobvandervoort 8y ago
August 22nd: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/46334 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/46334

rootlocus 8y ago

It's a pretty editor, but it's not an IDE. No build tools, no debugging, no navigation, no refactoring, etc.

sdesol 8y ago
I'm guessing IDE is more off a signal of intent for now.
TooBrokeToBeg 8y ago
Integrated with Git/Gitlab.
- bhhaskin 8y ago
  Right, but so does Atom. Atom is a text editor, not an IDE.
  - RussianCow 8y ago
    The line is pretty blurry these days. If you install enough extensions, it's very difficult to differentiate between Atom/VS Code and a "real" IDE.
    - em3rgent0rdr 8y ago
      Even vim can be made to function as an IDE.
  - romanr 8y ago
    As popular classic saying goes; If you have to create a project to save a file then it’s an IDE.
dimitrieh 8y ago
We are hard at work! Time and iterations are needed. A lot is coming your way, it is a very exciting project!

cabaalis 8y ago

I'll admit I'm a very poor "look and feel" person. But am I the only one who thinks that the zooming images on this webpage are hostile to the user? (1) The zoom animation takes too long, I want to see the screenshot (2) After zooming, it's still difficult to read to my 33-year-old eyes. I want a fullscreen image. (3) After finishing squinting at the screenshot, I scroll down to read more text only to have that text MOVE while I'm reading it as the screenshots animate back to their original positions.

Operyl 8y ago
It’s really bad on mobile, it literally just barely moves the screen shots around. I just have to view the image directly to get what I wanted out of it.
rootlocus 8y ago
I managed to bug an animation by scrolling too fast over it. One screenshot kept snapping back and forward 10 pixels really fast. I always feel like I'm not part of the demographic for these presentation pages.
- tschwimmer 8y ago
  I think it's just bugged. Was doing the exact same thing for me too.
magic_beans 8y ago
My god it gave me a headache. I'm sure a designer thought it was too cool to resist.
BinaryIdiot 8y ago
Yes! I thought it was broken at first with how the "zoom" worked. It's very unusable.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
Yup, this is very bad. That said, I find all JS-based "zooming" of images bad. The simplest behaviour is the best here - just make the thumbnail a link to raw image directly. If you absolutely have to have that JS-based gallery, then for goodness' sake, don't do it with CSS background shenanigans - use the <img> tag, so that "right click + view image" works. (To be fair to Gitlab, in this article "view image" works, and can be used to see images in full resolution.) Alas, I'm pretty sure that half of this breakage are designers cargo-culting trends instead of focusing on usability; the other half is user-hostile designs purposefully making it harder for regular users to get to the URL of the actual image.

ssijak 8y ago

What is the use for this? I mean how many people actually use such tools for actual day to day dev? Maybe for some quick edit if you don`t have laptop/computer at hand, but otherwise I see no real advantage of this.

kossae 8y ago
I'm asking the same question. We use GitLab at work, and the amount of bloat being added to this piece of software is becoming ridiculous. While I'm sure 'Auto-Devops' and other tools have their place at larger organizations, I'm struggling to find any real use case for a WebIDE that wouldn't be satisfied (and to a much better extent) by any of the other cloud IDE providers (see: Cloud9, etc.).
Dayshine 8y ago
I have several repos of text-file based validators that members of the public contribute to. They don't understand git, so it's handy to be able to edit on the website. Git has a super high learning curve for simple edits...
- slrz 8y ago
  GitLab always had a simple editor that you can use to make commits from the web interface. The Web IDE thing is something more sophisticated.
- dimitrieh 8y ago
  It's one of the problems we are trying to solve. Git is hard, so a guided experience can prove valuable. See for more information https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/47307 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/47307 and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/46122 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/46122 for example in how we are improving this starting with 11.1
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  The irony that Git was instrumental in the evolution to GUI-based computing, but didn't also make that same jump to lightspeed has always dumbfounded me. Git, like God, is good :) But even, over time, God has evolved and gotten more accessible.

zachlatta 8y ago

Wow, very cool. Lots of new players in this space: https://repl.it https://repl.it, https://glitch.me https://glitch.me, and now GitLab (and I'd be surprised if GitHub doesn't follow in tow). Cloud9's acquisition really left a big hole in the market. AFAIK there's still nothing out there that gives you a decent code editor (edit multiple files, have multiple tabs open, etc) that also gives you access to a Linux shell and ability to expose ports like Cloud9 did. Personally I'm most optimistic for https://repl.it https://repl.it. They already have a core userbase in high school classrooms and have been adding a ton of support for serverside applications to make it more appealing outside of the classroom.

m6g6a 8y ago
soon or later, i think github will introduce an ide based on the https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor
int0x80 8y ago
Ok. One question that bothers me. Why repl.it and company permit internet access through their sandboxes? How is that not restricted? I can just annonymously run stuff and use them as a proxy. That is a big no-no in my book, but I must be missing something.
- ezekg 8y ago
  They're the only online repl I can use to test API integrations (and produce interactive integration examples), so I think of it as a "feature." ;)
  - amasad 8y ago
    Ah cool. Do you have any examples online of how you use it?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]

client4 8y ago

If multiple users could use the "IDE" at the same time I could move entirely off of GSuite. Right now being able to edit the occasional code block with 4 people watching is worth GDocs.

tills13 8y ago
You could use VSCode Live Share...
- evv 8y ago
  Almost all of VSCode is open source, but live share is not.. On their website I noticed that they intend to provide generous 'free plans' of live share, which is a big hint about how Microsoft intends to monetize their open source products. In any case, I see a lot of value for the IDE to be integrated into your git host, so I think this is a great step for GitLab.
- Bellyache5 8y ago
  Or Atom’s Teletype plugin.

hn_user123 8y ago

Thank you , this is very helpful

madmulita 8y ago

I wonder what happend to the integration with Koding, the docs I can find only state that it's been deprecated. Seemed like a nice marriage.

dominotw 8y ago

I think they are spreading themselves too thin working on way too many features. Feature envy with github is not a good way to define your roadmap. They should drop everything and focus the most important feature: speed.

exikyut 8y ago
DARPA created a 1THz transistor four years ago. It's the fastest single transistor in existence. You could say... it focuses on speed, to the exclusion of all other features!

qop 8y ago

I'd love to see more symbiosis between editors and deployment tools. I could write my code and tests in the browser editor, and just have a dashboard with everything I need to know. Then when I'm at home I can use my editor and still hack the old fashioned way. I wish Microsoft has bought gitlab instead of github. They could have this new editor tie in with azure or something cool like that. Like websharper, but for everybody else.

shayac2 8y ago
Gitlab is using Monaco for this. An open sourced online editor brought to you by none other than Microsoft. (https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor) I couldn't dig it up now but I recall seeing that Microsoft started this project as an online code editor for Azure, later using it in VSCode. So it would not be surprising if they bring this to github some time in the future.
- qop 8y ago
  I'm well aware of monaco. I doubt something like what gitlab is building will come to github. Maybe a quick edit editor, but nothing more. Gitlab is going to integrate this to gitlab's CICD infra. If github gets one, it'll be a shitty typo fixer, that's it.
- ivan_burazin 8y ago
  It still is "alive" somewhere in Azure but MS scrapped it really and focused making the best possible Desktop Editor. You wont see a web editor form them soon.

shayac2 8y ago

Ironic how they have Microsoft to thank for open-sourcing Monaco

pomber 8y ago

> We are planning for an even better experience in the future: one where we can integrate and support more advanced features, such as a live environment to test your code against This. Please. I'm playing with a similar concept for GitHub: https://twitter.com/pomber/status/1003416752146075648 https://twitter.com/pomber/status/1003416752146075648

tootie 8y ago
One day, I can toss out all my expensive hardware and do my job with a hi-res Chromebook and steady wifi.
- freehunter 8y ago
  Depending on your job, you might be able to. All of my webdev is done using remote servers, I go back and forth between Cloud9 and Vim+EC2. I don't even have any locally-installed dev tools, and with Vim I can use my phone or tablet in a pinch. That setup doesn't work for everything, but it's great for some use cases.
  - ezekg 8y ago
    Using Vim from a phone or tablet sounds like a nightmare, tbh. I can barely text without typos.
    - swiley 8y ago
      Vim is actually pretty usable on a phone, my problem with it is that phones just feel like toys and so I have a hard time with putting myself in the right mood to do anything useful
      - hestefisk 8y ago
        You could connect a Bluetooth keyboard to the phone and it would make a decent terminal emulator :)
- 8y ago

upbeatlinux 8y ago

Hmm, at one point wasn't there a tight integration between Koding and GitLab? Or at least an attempt to make the tools more cooperative? In fact a Koding acquisition by GitLab seemed like a no brainer. FWIW ~2012-2013 there was Cloud9, Koding and Nitrous. Now that Nitrous is defunct and Cloud9 was acquired I'm not sure what fills the void. Put differently is there a void to fill? Is there an actual demand for web IDE's? Or is this just bling?

exsilium 8y ago
If you are looking for a self-host solution, you can still use the [GPL version of Cloud9 v2](https://github.com/exsilium/cloud9 https://github.com/exsilium/cloud9). All contributions to the project are warmly welcome.
staz 8y ago
That was their plan but it didn't work out, they talked about it here https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/04/devops-strategy/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/04/devops-strategy/ (it's quite an interesting article in general) > And to be honest, it was what we were hoping that Koding would have provided for us, and we have an integration with them, but it hasn’t worked out, really, the way that we had hoped. And so, we’re looking at alternatives, and we think we can probably do this ourselves.

nik736 8y ago

They have far more important things to focus on, I wonder why they waste so much time for such a useless feature.

bdcravens 8y ago
You could argue the same about their CI/CD features. I don't necessarily consider this a useless feature. I've edited files live on Github (usually things that are safe to edit, like READMEs) and I wouldn't mind the editor being a bit more feature-rich.

bitL 8y ago

GitLab is slowly on its way to compete with Microsoft, Google, JetBrains... I hope you guys create your own programming language as well to become a real software company ;-) Good luck!

welly 8y ago
What are they now if not a "real software company"?
- bitL 8y ago
  OK. I meant a Tier #1 admired software company ;-) Own language is a must to earn admiration of developers :)
sytse 8y ago
Thanks! One of our sub-values is boring solutions https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#efficiency https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#efficiency So I don't think we'll be creating a programming language soon. I'm following crystal https://crystal-lang.org/ https://crystal-lang.org/ with interest. And one of our team members is making one in a private capacity https://gitlab.com/yorickpeterse/inko https://gitlab.com/yorickpeterse/inko
- bitL 8y ago
  Cool! You never know - AFAIK Kotlin first started as an individual project as well. I'll keep an eye on you ;-)
sverhagen 8y ago
I admire Gitlab in all sorts of ways, but in the context of IDEs, they're no JetBrains yet. Their IDE is unsurpassed for Java folks. I tried to stick with Eclipse as long as I could, but IntelliJ keeps adding amazing features at a breakneck speed. Admittedly, Java is a very IDE heavy language, umm, "culturally" (while I've seen people doing Python or JavaScript in other editors like vim, for Java that seems hardly ever the case). Maybe this whole online IDE thing is just not aimed at is Java folks? (Like... How would I do TDD?)

adamrezich 8y ago

Anyone remember back when Heroku had something sort of like a primitive version of this? Whatever happened to that? I spent many a high school lunch break in the library teaching myself how to make Rails apps using it

fladd 8y ago

Looks interesting, but it has the same bug as the normal file editing in Gitlab. As soon as I click on edit, the syntax highlighting (no matter what theme I have selected) changes to something completely different.

hippich 8y ago

I wonder if VSC could be used as a library to render editor in the browser.

c17r 8y ago
They are using the Monaco editor which is the basis for VSC

bluedino 8y ago

I have been dreaming about something like this since the first time I went from notepad/ftp/netscape

NVRM 8y ago

safwan 8y ago

I think Janitor seems similar! https://janitor.technology/ https://janitor.technology/

ryenus 8y ago

Sourcegraph used to be an online vscode, simply the coolest back then, but seems no more, they suddenly changed direction, possibly due to conflict of interests with Microsoft?

sqs 8y ago
Sourcegraph CEO here. VS Code is great for editing, but Sourcegraph is code search/browsing. So we switched to using a read-only code view that loads super fast on the web. It has basically all the same features as before: https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/gorilla/websocket/-/blob/conn.go#L281 https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/gorilla/websocket/-/blob/... has code intelligence hovers, Git blame, symbols, etc. What features do you miss?

hestefisk 8y ago

I could see a use case for vi style keybindings on top of Monaco.

akulbe 8y ago

A couple questions. Is there any way to change the font size in the Web IDE? Is there a dark mode? Thank you for this!

paradite 8y ago

I have been using GitLab IDE in the past few months for documentation updates and it has been great. Whenever I see an outdated doc in the repo, I just click edit on the markdown file. It provides markdown preview and automatically creates patch-n branch and merge request for me without the need to touch my terminal. Super convenient.

Kamshak 8y ago

I feel like StackBlitz beats all other Web IDEs since it's pretty much just VSCode in the Browser. The only one where TS code completion works and they can offer it very cheaply since the tech is so great that they don't even need to run a server to bundle anything. Just great! ATM it's only good for frontend apps though. My dream would be a combination of Cloud9 and the StackBlitz editor.

abtinf 8y ago

At first I was excited about this. Then I tried it. There is no working set. Reloading the web page loses all changes. This would have been a nice path to bring less technical folks into gitlab, say for writing articles and other copy. But I can already imagine the non-stop complaints about losing work.

exikyut 8y ago
Well, that shouldn't be very hard to solve; at the worst save the "working set" in a UI-specific cache (aka detached from the git repo), and maybe offer options for autosaving into branches. I do agree this is something that needs to be solved, but cannot categorically be solved elegantly, so GitLab needs to just get on with just doing what will work.

sverhagen 8y ago

How does a Java developer do TDD in an online IDE?

mch82 8y ago
One way is to use the CI Pipeline feature of GitLab. When you commit your code, run it though a build stage (if necessary) and then a test stage. Any tests that output an error will cause the test stage of the CI Pipeline to fail. I set up a simple proof of concept [1]. My goal is to complete the "Your First RPM Package" tutorial [2] using Web IDE from a iPad 6th Gen. [3] is the resulting CI Pipeline. I recognize this is nowhere near a "real" project (and hadn't ever planned to really share or use it). Maybe someone else has a more complete example? Edit: Since you mentioned Java development, it might be worth reading through the answers to the Stack Overflow question "How to use GitLab CI to build a Java Maven project?" [4]. [1]: https://gitlab.com/mchogan/iPad-experiment/tree/mchogan-master-patch-25358 https://gitlab.com/mchogan/iPad-experiment/tree/mchogan-mast... [2]: https://rpm-packaging-guide.github.io/#hello-world https://rpm-packaging-guide.github.io/#hello-world "Your First RPM Package" [3]: https://gitlab.com/mchogan/iPad-experiment/pipelines/22777931 https://gitlab.com/mchogan/iPad-experiment/pipelines/2277793... [4]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/33430487/3877908 https://stackoverflow.com/q/33430487/3877908 "How to use GitLab CI to build a Java Maven project?"

snurk 8y ago

I wish GitLab would take whatever resources this has and put them all on site reliability. They have a ton of open positions listed, but none are for Site Reliability Engineer. Frequent slow requests and 5xx errors keep me from giving GitLab a real try.

sytse 8y ago
Getting GitLab.com reliable is a top priority. We are hiring multiple SREs and https://jobs.lever.co/gitlab/a9ec2996-b7b6-4d87-aed0-1fc2ce3f8faa https://jobs.lever.co/gitlab/a9ec2996-b7b6-4d87-aed0-1fc2ce3... is on our jobs page.
erikb 8y ago
You can't have a gazillion features and be stable. I think it's quite clear which direction Gitlab is going.
golergka 8y ago
And performance. I migrated our project from Gitlab to Githab exactly because of how excruciatingly slow PR workflow was (serialized game assets routinely have changesets in tens of thousands of lines).
- philipwhiuk 8y ago
  Git-fat/GFS and treating assets as binary would seem to be the solution here. There's no way you can review tens of thousands of lines.
  - golergka 8y ago
    When they're in tens of thousands, no. But quite often files of the same format, and even the same files have just a couple of changes that are definitely reviewable.

sbose78 8y ago

Good job! This looks like a great code/text editor than an IDE at the moment. You would need some sort of code navigation, debug and run capabilities to call it an IDE :) Hope to see more soon? Redhat's OpenShift.io Eclipse Che integration would be a good example of a cloud IDE where you can could code,build and debug off a web-browser backed by a container-based workspace running on Kubernetes.

mch82 8y ago
If Web IDE follows in the footsteps of other GitLab features, then it'll catch up soon!

searover 8y ago

good

abc_lisper 8y ago

Why are people building these verticals? What happened to Unix philosophy? Build tools that do simple things, and make composition do the work for you. I don't see why anyone needs an online IDE. Much less one interfaced with Gitlab. What next, invent a new cpu too?

yoz-y 8y ago
Unix philosophy does not work on the web because even with all the talk about micro services, you can not easily chain or combine web tools together.
- abc_lisper 8y ago
  But why write code on the web? If you are typing you are already on a computer
  - kylestlb 8y ago
    I hear you. I'm sure a lot of other people lurking here agree as well.
  - jakelazaroff 8y ago
    Conversely, if all you need is a web IDE that abstracts individual tools away, why bother dealing with them? Setting up and maintaining a development environment environment is at best annoying and at worst daunting, especially if you're a beginner.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    Lots of companies do their development work on per-developer remote VMs, especially for resource-intensive applications that need nontrivial configuration-management setup for databases, message queues, etc. that they depend on. Currently your choices are emacs/vim over SSH or sync from your local machine (where the code intelligence / debugging integration probably doesn't work as desired). A web IDE allows an arbitrarily powerful cloud instance to do the heavy lifting of build/test/code intelligence while the developer still gets a full-featured GUI IDE. Especially since VS Code and Atom are Electron apps, it's a natural step to use them to edit remote files. Better than VNC, anyway.

truth_seeker 8y ago

Very nice. Looks like Gitlab is getting better and better at everything devs desire.

amelius 8y ago

It seems that one group of developers wants to decentralize everything, while another group wants to centralize everything. ... Why?

ckocagil 8y ago
Decentralize for privacy and anti-censorship, centralize for convenience (collaboration, sharing, zero management, continue working where you left off on another device, ...)
- amelius 8y ago
  Yeah, but we can have all the advantages you mentioned for a centralized system, while using a decentralized system. Also, centralization is against the Unix philosophy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

TabTwo 8y ago

Has GitLab already been bought by Apple?

exikyut 8y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple quietly uses them internally. 100k companies with a horizontal app like this (and "source code management" is pretty horizontal in any vaguely tech-incorporating industry) probably includes all the big names.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

enesunal 8y ago

I guess online vs-code for github will be available soon.

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