I keep reinventing this one kind of thing: I have some text that I know how to render into some interesting HTML or JavaScript. So I’d like to be ab

The next 700 tiny web-based text editors

submited by

Style Pass

2024-05-16 06:00:12

I keep reinventing this one kind of thing: I have some text that I know how to render into some interesting HTML or JavaScript. So I’d like to be able to have a web page where I edit some text over here (gestures with one hand) to the left, and I’d like to update the text-derived thingy over here (gestures with the other hand) to the right at the push of a button (or maybe just automatically when I stop typing for a tenth of a second).

So it’s possible to make the browser a nice place to write text, and in fact almost 100% of the text I write into a computer is in a web application derived from one of three sources:

Aside: Of the examples I gave, every one of uses either Codemirror 5 (Tutch, Jaco, p5.js, Ellie, and also CodePen, GitHub Gist, and the once-great runkit) or Codemirror 6 (Dusa, GrapiQL, and also Overleaf, replit, val.town and most of GitHub), which was effectively a full rewrite that Haverbeke embarked on from the beginning of 2018 to the end of 2021. This wasn’t intentional, and I really went hunting for an online editor I interact with that isn’t Codemirror, but I came up empty except for paste.sr.ht, which uses the Amazon-associated Ace editor. End of aside.

The browser is not a kind place to write text unless you put some effort into it. And if you want to have a little tool that lets people write some text, press a button, and see some output from that text, you really don’t want to give people an unkind experience for writing text, but that’s also not where you want to put your effort!