Tool for easy code editing right in the browser

UPD: The title was changed from “IDE - evil. Let's use Notepad "for more adequate.



Sometimes it seems that the developers of some large Internet projects still write code in Notepad and think that everyone else should do the same. Joke, of course, but why in most popular CMS there are still no convenient tools for editing code, I can not understand. No matter how I try.

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If you sometimes do not have enough syntax highlighting when editing code in the browser - welcome under cat.

Source of the problem

The story began at a time when I had to make a couple of sites on Joomla 1.5. Even then I could not understand why in the standard editor of articles based on TinyMCE there was no syntax highlighting when viewing the source code. I encountered the same problem in WordPress. "Well, what's stopping you from putting a third-party plugin that replaces the standard editor with a more powerful one and live peacefully?" Yes, in something you are right. For example, for the same WordPress, there are more than a dozen of such plugins. For Joomla and, I think, there are plenty of other CMS too. Of course, it’s possible to argue about their advantages and disadvantages for a long time, but allow me, is it really impossible to make this simple functionality accessible from a box in products used by hundreds of thousands of people every day?



Well, suppose we have closed the issue with popular CMS. Most likely, by searching it will be possible to find a more or less suitable plug-in that can be used in all future projects. But here the fun begins. If you worked with powerful themes for WordPress, taken, for example, with ThemeForest , then you will immediately understand what I mean . As a rule, most of them provide customization by adding custom HTML / CSS / JavaScript code to different parts of the site. For example, like this:







And if HTML / JavaScript code is usually written once, then CSS is often necessary to edit. And what would you do in this case? Use your favorite IDE and constantly switch to the browser and back to make the necessary changes? Of course it is possible. But, you see, it is somehow not very convenient. And there are plugins for the same WordPress, in which you can also write code. And syntax highlighting is supported by only a few of them. I bet that besides this, there are still a lot of cases when for some reason someone needs to edit a piece of code right in the browser.

My decision

At this stage, I realized that I wanted to be able to work comfortably with the code on the web. In any CMS, in any theme or plugin. Everywhere.



That's how the idea of ​​the CodeHighlight project was born - an extension for Google Chrome, which allows you to turn any text field into a mini-IDE with syntax highlighting and checking the source code for errors. The basis was taken JavaScript library Ace , which is able to do everything necessary. It remains to write the extension itself, which could embed Ace in any text editor.

What happened

A couple of days later I showed the first version of the extension to my friends. They advised to add a choice of topics for the editor, and also suggested another interesting case - highlighting the sources in a text document. They had to periodically review the code from raw.github.com . This task is also not difficult. True, another library was taken for work - highlight.js .



To begin with, it was decided not to integrate with TinyMCE and other WYSIWYG editors. However, at the request of small but active users, integration with TinyMCE was added to the latest version. By the way, from the messages of users, it became clear that not everyone uses third-party plug-ins to edit posts in Joomla and other CMS.

Future of the project

So, what we have today. There is an extension with a huge audience of 80 people (yes, I have the best skills for promoting my own projects, like most programmers). There is a suspicion that it may be useful to someone other than me. I think other people may have other similar cases that it would be good to solve with a similar extension.



There is still enthusiasm to develop the project further. Even despite the fact that I still do not see any commercial benefits in it. I just don’t want to bury an instrument in the ground that can make life even a little easier for someone.



What do you think?