Show HN: Ymacs - Emacs in the browser with Dropbox, GDrive, etc (opens in new tab)

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.

Posted 1 month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4209091

And 2 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1862442

And 3 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=962562

...

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.

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

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

Now how about Vim?

The core of the editor is YMacs (http://www.ymacs.org/).

I just integrated filepicker.io. The source is at https://github.com/tageorgiou/ymacs

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

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/ and [Try Out] there links to http://tageorgiou.github.com/ymacs/demo/

* It seems to have some character encoding issues in the modeline:

ymacs.frames[0].getModelineElement().innerHTML

"-- <b>test.js</b>Â&nbsp;Â&nbsp;49% of 1.35kÂ&nbsp;Â&nbsp;(13,3) "

[Live demo] at http://www.ymacs.org/ links to http://www.ymacs.org/demo/

* Modeline looks good in this one:

ymacs.frames[0].getModelineElement().innerHTML

"-- <b>test.lisp</b> (1,0) "

brettcvz, mishoo, tomelam, keep up the good work, I really like this!

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

mind blown