[IPython-dev] Ace versus CodeMirror

John Fawcett fawce at quantopian.com
Sun Jan 22 22:11:31 EST 2012


Hi,

I think the long-form edit case is very promising. It borders on full blown
development, and seems to imply the eventual unification of the cellular
edit style with the file-oriented style of a typical editor. Is that the
idea? (Aside: i signed up for c9.io based on the Ace editor project, and it
is the best online IDE I've tried - they have tabbed editors btw).

- I tried selecting a block in a cell, and it seemed like tab did indent,
and shift-tab de-indented. Is that what you meant by indentation support?
- the total lack of docstring support in CM is annoying, maybe it is
feasible to patch CM to support it properly?
- CM has a decent demo of search/replace, that I think is as good as Ace:
http://codemirror.net/demo/search.html

My free advice (which is worth what you pay for it :) ) is to aim to have
one editor for cell and long-form editing. It seems like getting the
docstring and indentation support in CM would have to be compared to
getting Ace to support multiple editors on one page.

thanks,
fawce


On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 5:39 PM, Fernando Perez <fperez.net at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 1:56 PM, Brian Granger <ellisonbg at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Some questions:
> >
> > * Is Ace really that much better that it is worth us shipping/using it?
> > * Do people like the ability to edit a single cell in a
> > more-full-window capacity?
> >
> > Please check out the Ace capabilty in master and let us know what you
> think...
>
> There are some limitations of CM that make it really painful for
> editing longer cells:
>
> - inability to rigidly indent/dedent whole blocks.  This is a killer
> for refactoring just about anything.
>
> - no indentation support (not even soft-tabs) inside docstrings.
> Typing eight spaces at the beginning of each line in a method
> docstring is ridiculously annoying.  I just type them in emacs and
> paste them back in.
>
> - no search and replace: also killer for refactoring.
>
> These are the big ones for me, so I'm +1 on including Ace.
>
> There's also the fact that in teaching/workshops, we often struggle
> with the question of 'what editor should I use along with ipython'.
> Once Ace is available, we can simply tell people to use it for editing
> also their python scripts, all within the ipython workflow.  This may
> not be the long-term solution they want if they become full-time
> users, but when you only have a day or two to teach a group some
> basics, having ipython provide them a complete solution out of the box
> would be great, I think.
>
> Cheers,
>
> f
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