7 ms·

Show HN: Ymacs - Emacs in the browser with Dropbox, GDrive, etc

125 points by tagx 14y ago

tagx 14y ago
The core of the editor is YMacs (http://www.ymacs.org/ http://www.ymacs.org/). I just integrated filepicker.io. The source is at https://github.com/tageorgiou/ymacs https://github.com/tageorgiou/ymacs
liyanchang 14y ago
Pretty Cool. I hate having to download files from Dropbox just to upload again when I need to save. I think this might do the trick. EDIT: I just realized that it's not clear. I do use the client and it works really well from my computer. It doesn't work very well from a computer lab.
- bbwharris 14y ago
  Just curious, any reason you don't install the dropbox client? You can selectively sync specific directories. I keep all my code on a folder in Dropbox, and it's the only folder that I sync. (I don't want large images, PSD's, etc getting synced on my MB Air)
- ori_b 14y ago
  That's why dropbox app has an automatically synced folder. Just edit the files there, and they'll automatically be uploaded. That's the entire point of the dropbox model. It's a folder. That syncs automatically. No crappy upload pages needed.
  - liyanchang 14y ago
    Ah. Sorry. I was talking about when I'm working in computer labs. Unfortunately, I can't download the client. Comment edited.
Estragon 14y ago
Good start. What's the timeline for the elisp interpreter? :-)
- mishoo 14y ago
  See http://lisperator.net/slip/ http://lisperator.net/slip/ ;-)
osener 14y ago
You might want to use "text/*" as the mimetype argument to filepicker.getFile to filter out sources like webcam and Instagram.
- theatrus2 14y ago
  I noticed it doesn't choke when you upload a binary to it, but sadly doesn't have `hexl-mode` to do anything useful with it.
geogra4 14y ago
Now how about Vim?
- liyanchang 14y ago
  Saw something on HN a couple weeks ago. http://mit.edu/~georgiou/www/vi/ http://mit.edu/~georgiou/www/vi/
lefnire 14y ago
mind blown
jack-r-abbit 14y ago
Not working in my browser. When looking at the source I see it probably only works in FF. But I also noticed you've included "ymacs-mode-markdown.js" twice. Edit... ok refreshed the page a few times and it seems to be working now. Cool.
ajross 14y ago
It's not emacs (I guess it's "an emacs"). It's an editor that does syntax coloring, handles the core emacs keystrokes, and implements the subset of GNU emacs functionality that the author uses in a routine manner. Right off the bat, I hit the following speedbumps: + No replace-regexp + No set-fill-prefix (or it's unbound) + Default fill prefix detection doesn't work like GNU emacs (e.g. no way to fill a long paragraph with a prefix of "> " for quoting email) + No ispell-word (or any spell checker) on C-$ + C-x b tab doesn't give me the list of buffers I expect + No keyboard navigability in file selection dialog! I hit C-x C-f and end up in this weird web 2.0 world where I'm (no joke) prompted to "Drag files here". So.. it's cute. But other than the author (or someone else willing to reimplement the bits of emacs they need) I don't see to whom it's going to appeal. Serious emacs users aren't the target demographic.
- stcredzero 14y ago
  An excellent, informative, high value comment! Someone could host emacs in virtual machines that have a bunch of real emacsen hosted with TTYs implemented in Javascript and a virtual filesystem that actually writes to Dropbox. Someone could probably make good lifestyle-business money doing that.
  - eslaught 14y ago
    If you're going to go to that much trouble, you might as well just compile Emacs to Javascript with enscripten and run it natively in the browser. The download time might be painful, but then we'd have a web editor actually worth using.
    - jdc 14y ago
      Better just to do a smaller editor like Vim.
    - stcredzero 14y ago
      There's more value in having Emacs cloud hosted, I think. The old joke that it's an OS masquerading as a text editor is actually somewhat true. Hosted in the cloud, you have really great bandwidth to other cloud environments, all accessible through low-bandwidth requirement TTY.
Bootvis 14y ago
Very nice! I was seriosuly missing something like this, especially for my org-files. A few times a week I want to add or change something to my todo.org but I can't because I'm at some corporate computer. At the moment I try to remember and make my changes when I can, far from ideal. My plan is to use parenscript to convert the org elisp code to Javascript and provide some extra functionality such as document export through a webserver running headless emacs. Any opinions on this idea? Could this be possible with YMacs?
rcfox 14y ago
Posted 1 month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4209091 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4209091 And 2 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1862442 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1862442 And 3 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=962562 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=962562 ...
- jack-r-abbit 14y ago
 Wait... that first link in your list from a month ago... that was actually forked to make the one for this thread. They appear to be identical. So if I fork it, can I post it too like I made it? I don't get it. I'm guessing there is some reason somewhere that makes this not a rip off? What am I missing?
 - rcfox 14y ago
 In fact, it was forked about an hour ago, and the only changes seem to be the gh-pages branch, and are pretty much summed up by: - <title>Ymacs by brettcvz</title> + <title>Ymacs by tageorgiou</title>
- brettcvz 14y ago
 I posted this a month ago but it never reached the front page. tagx emailed me about it asking if he could post it and I said it was fine. More distribution is better, right?
 - jack-r-abbit 14y ago
 More distro is fine, sure... but the OP's comment seems to be taking credit for this entirely. Is that still better? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4377752 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4377752
b0rsuk 14y ago
I understand the technical challenge, but the Emacs-y way would be to run the browser inside Emacs. Not the other way around.
abbot2 14y ago
M-x doctor: No such command: doctor. You should just call that "yet another online editor", really.
biomechanica 14y ago
Wouldn't mind seeing Emacs ported to NaCl. That would be a fun project, I think.
sukuriant 14y ago
I am sad, there is no M-x tetris... In seriousness, this is quite a cool attempt. For some reason, using an international keyboard with the application prevents me from ever getting the ' character to appear. I'm not sure why this is the case.
anaran 14y ago
My feedback is targeted at the ymacs demos giving a better "first impression", which at this point might be the only one allowed for many. I am taking the time because that's the most emacsy (unintended bun) experience I've had in a web editor and to me that is a compliment. I had to "Load its own code!" and read it to jump over these brick walls: * C-x C-b is undefined * C-h gives me a chrome://chrome/history/ lesson, but that might be chrome's fault * M-x sounds the bell (why?) but "that's all she wrote". Neiter ? nor SPC do more than insert themselves in the minibuffer. Reading sources I find M-x switch_to_buffer (C-x b) would work, if only by keyboard (the menu does not allow one to actually pick an entry). Why not implement C-x C-b? Would it be that hard? Or just let it do what C-x b does for now? M-x ? and M-x SPC listing all available commands would be a big win too. But a commad like M-x switch_to_buffer should not really be presented to an emacs user, make that M-x switch-to-buffer, even if some internal mapping may be needed. This HN article links to http://tageorgiou.github.com/ymacs/ http://tageorgiou.github.com/ymacs/ and [Try Out] there links to http://tageorgiou.github.com/ymacs/demo/ http://tageorgiou.github.com/ymacs/demo/ * It seems to have some character encoding issues in the modeline: ymacs.frames[0].getModelineElement().innerHTML "-- test.jsÂ Â 49% of 1.35kÂ Â (13,3) " [Live demo] at http://www.ymacs.org/ http://www.ymacs.org/ links to http://www.ymacs.org/demo/ http://www.ymacs.org/demo/ * Modeline looks good in this one: ymacs.frames[0].getModelineElement().innerHTML "-- test.lisp (1,0) " brettcvz, mishoo, tomelam, keep up the good work, I really like this!
samuel1604 14y ago
man great but control-w close the browser window not cool!

125 points by tagx 14y ago

tagx 14y ago

The core of the editor is YMacs (http://www.ymacs.org/ http://www.ymacs.org/). I just integrated filepicker.io. The source is at https://github.com/tageorgiou/ymacs https://github.com/tageorgiou/ymacs

liyanchang 14y ago

Pretty Cool. I hate having to download files from Dropbox just to upload again when I need to save. I think this might do the trick. EDIT: I just realized that it's not clear. I do use the client and it works really well from my computer. It doesn't work very well from a computer lab.

bbwharris 14y ago
Just curious, any reason you don't install the dropbox client? You can selectively sync specific directories. I keep all my code on a folder in Dropbox, and it's the only folder that I sync. (I don't want large images, PSD's, etc getting synced on my MB Air)
ori_b 14y ago
That's why dropbox app has an automatically synced folder. Just edit the files there, and they'll automatically be uploaded. That's the entire point of the dropbox model. It's a folder. That syncs automatically. No crappy upload pages needed.
- liyanchang 14y ago
  Ah. Sorry. I was talking about when I'm working in computer labs. Unfortunately, I can't download the client. Comment edited.

Estragon 14y ago

Good start. What's the timeline for the elisp interpreter? :-)

mishoo 14y ago
See http://lisperator.net/slip/ http://lisperator.net/slip/ ;-)

osener 14y ago

You might want to use "text/*" as the mimetype argument to filepicker.getFile to filter out sources like webcam and Instagram.

theatrus2 14y ago
I noticed it doesn't choke when you upload a binary to it, but sadly doesn't have `hexl-mode` to do anything useful with it.

geogra4 14y ago

Now how about Vim?

liyanchang 14y ago
Saw something on HN a couple weeks ago. http://mit.edu/~georgiou/www/vi/ http://mit.edu/~georgiou/www/vi/

lefnire 14y ago

mind blown

jack-r-abbit 14y ago

Not working in my browser. When looking at the source I see it probably only works in FF. But I also noticed you've included "ymacs-mode-markdown.js" twice. Edit... ok refreshed the page a few times and it seems to be working now. Cool.

ajross 14y ago

It's not emacs (I guess it's "an emacs"). It's an editor that does syntax coloring, handles the core emacs keystrokes, and implements the subset of GNU emacs functionality that the author uses in a routine manner. Right off the bat, I hit the following speedbumps: + No replace-regexp + No set-fill-prefix (or it's unbound) + Default fill prefix detection doesn't work like GNU emacs (e.g. no way to fill a long paragraph with a prefix of "> " for quoting email) + No ispell-word (or any spell checker) on C-$ + C-x b tab doesn't give me the list of buffers I expect + No keyboard navigability in file selection dialog! I hit C-x C-f and end up in this weird web 2.0 world where I'm (no joke) prompted to "Drag files here". So.. it's cute. But other than the author (or someone else willing to reimplement the bits of emacs they need) I don't see to whom it's going to appeal. Serious emacs users aren't the target demographic.

stcredzero 14y ago
An excellent, informative, high value comment! Someone could host emacs in virtual machines that have a bunch of real emacsen hosted with TTYs implemented in Javascript and a virtual filesystem that actually writes to Dropbox. Someone could probably make good lifestyle-business money doing that.
- eslaught 14y ago
  If you're going to go to that much trouble, you might as well just compile Emacs to Javascript with enscripten and run it natively in the browser. The download time might be painful, but then we'd have a web editor actually worth using.
  - jdc 14y ago
    Better just to do a smaller editor like Vim.
  - stcredzero 14y ago
    There's more value in having Emacs cloud hosted, I think. The old joke that it's an OS masquerading as a text editor is actually somewhat true. Hosted in the cloud, you have really great bandwidth to other cloud environments, all accessible through low-bandwidth requirement TTY.

Bootvis 14y ago

Very nice! I was seriosuly missing something like this, especially for my org-files. A few times a week I want to add or change something to my todo.org but I can't because I'm at some corporate computer. At the moment I try to remember and make my changes when I can, far from ideal. My plan is to use parenscript to convert the org elisp code to Javascript and provide some extra functionality such as document export through a webserver running headless emacs. Any opinions on this idea? Could this be possible with YMacs?

rcfox 14y ago

Posted 1 month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4209091 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4209091 And 2 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1862442 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1862442 And 3 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=962562 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=962562 ...

jack-r-abbit 14y ago
Wait... that first link in your list from a month ago... that was actually forked to make the one for this thread. They appear to be identical. So if I fork it, can I post it too like I made it? I don't get it. I'm guessing there is some reason somewhere that makes this not a rip off? What am I missing?
- rcfox 14y ago
 In fact, it was forked about an hour ago, and the only changes seem to be the gh-pages branch, and are pretty much summed up by: - <title>Ymacs by brettcvz</title> + <title>Ymacs by tageorgiou</title>
brettcvz 14y ago
I posted this a month ago but it never reached the front page. tagx emailed me about it asking if he could post it and I said it was fine. More distribution is better, right?
- jack-r-abbit 14y ago
  More distro is fine, sure... but the OP's comment seems to be taking credit for this entirely. Is that still better? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4377752 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4377752

b0rsuk 14y ago

I understand the technical challenge, but the Emacs-y way would be to run the browser inside Emacs. Not the other way around.

abbot2 14y ago

M-x doctor: No such command: doctor. You should just call that "yet another online editor", really.

biomechanica 14y ago

Wouldn't mind seeing Emacs ported to NaCl. That would be a fun project, I think.

sukuriant 14y ago

I am sad, there is no M-x tetris... In seriousness, this is quite a cool attempt. For some reason, using an international keyboard with the application prevents me from ever getting the ' character to appear. I'm not sure why this is the case.

anaran 14y ago

My feedback is targeted at the ymacs demos giving a better "first impression", which at this point might be the only one allowed for many. I am taking the time because that's the most emacsy (unintended bun) experience I've had in a web editor and to me that is a compliment. I had to "Load its own code!" and read it to jump over these brick walls: * C-x C-b is undefined * C-h gives me a chrome://chrome/history/ lesson, but that might be chrome's fault * M-x sounds the bell (why?) but "that's all she wrote". Neiter ? nor SPC do more than insert themselves in the minibuffer. Reading sources I find M-x switch_to_buffer (C-x b) would work, if only by keyboard (the menu does not allow one to actually pick an entry). Why not implement C-x C-b? Would it be that hard? Or just let it do what C-x b does for now? M-x ? and M-x SPC listing all available commands would be a big win too. But a commad like M-x switch_to_buffer should not really be presented to an emacs user, make that M-x switch-to-buffer, even if some internal mapping may be needed. This HN article links to http://tageorgiou.github.com/ymacs/ http://tageorgiou.github.com/ymacs/ and [Try Out] there links to http://tageorgiou.github.com/ymacs/demo/ http://tageorgiou.github.com/ymacs/demo/ * It seems to have some character encoding issues in the modeline: ymacs.frames[0].getModelineElement().innerHTML "-- test.jsÂ Â 49% of 1.35kÂ Â (13,3) " [Live demo] at http://www.ymacs.org/ http://www.ymacs.org/ links to http://www.ymacs.org/demo/ http://www.ymacs.org/demo/ * Modeline looks good in this one: ymacs.frames[0].getModelineElement().innerHTML "-- test.lisp (1,0) " brettcvz, mishoo, tomelam, keep up the good work, I really like this!

samuel1604 14y ago

man great but control-w close the browser window not cool!