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I'm a freelance web designer & developer with over 14 years commercial experience in creating web sites, apps and eShops for companies large and small around the world. My focus is to drive the web forward with great new solutions to make everyones life better and find the best way to achieve this with open source solutions. Community power FTW! :)
Authored Comments
Hi Stephan
Some good comments here, tho a few responses on your points. ICEcoder is different because you can run it online or offline. You of course miss out on the benefits of connecting to web services or coding from anywhere, but if you don't want to, or it's not really practical to work online, no worries, it runs quite happy locally. It also means you have a local copy of your files.
Another key point of ICEcoder is that it's not exactly working in the cloud (I believe) because you're not working in your set account like you would with, say Google Docs, you work on your web server/hosts. I hear what you're saying about dependancy tho and may look into pushing/merging files to a site when you're ready to deploy.
I wouldn't say this is about working in a trendier way, it's about working smarter. Plus, if you have a many programs open (text editor, DB software, image viewer, graphics editor, Github etc) you're likely to be using more rources (RAM, CPU etc) than just a web browser.
Lastly, I agree Vim and Emacs keybindings would be nice. They're being worked on extensively at the moment by open source community and when they're ready (hopefully next couple of weeks), they'll make their way into ICEcoder. This hopefully shows that if you want it, you can build it. Being open source means it's highly customisable. Another example - last week I decided I wanted an eyedropper tool on the image viewer, wrote it in 2-3 hrs and is now instantly available.
May not have convinced you on these points but it hopefully goes some way towards showing how ICEcoder is more open source and different than the others.
Not sure I'd agree. On filesize, software based editors are heavier. Sublime (5.3 mb), Brackets (28.8mb), Textmate (12.3mb), Vim (9.1mb) and more are all way above ICEcoders 1.1mb. It's naturally going to be lighter because most of what you need is already provided by the browser. It just builds ontop of what's already open, the browser.
On resource usage too, it boots in 1-2 seconds and barely scratches the CPU or RAM. I run it quite happily on my 2.6Ghz with 4G RAM and used to run it fine on a 1.4Ghz with 2G RAM. Have tried so many desktop editors that take ages to boot and then are resource hogs. Don't get any of that anymore.
I like Vim too, mainly for the keybindings, but doesn't do everything I want. That said, browser code editors aren't for everyone, but there's a growing movement towards them. You've just got to work the way that suits you and it sounds like Vim is best for you. For me it's ICEcoder. The next guy may insist it's Sublime.
Whatever works for you is the 'right way' to code :)