Ace (from Ajax.org Cloud9 Editor) is a standalone code editor written in

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

. The goal is to create a web-based code editor that matches and extends the features, usability, and performance of existing native editors such as

TextMate TextMate is a free and open-source general-purpose GUI text editor for macOS created by Allan Odgaard. TextMate features declarative customizations, tabs for open documents, recordable macros, folding sections, snippets, shell integration, a ...

, Vim, or

Eclipse An eclipse is an astronomical event which occurs when an astronomical object or spacecraft is temporarily obscured, by passing into the shadow of another body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer. This alignment of three ...

. It can be easily embedded in any web page and JavaScript application. Ace is developed as the primary editor for Cloud9 IDE and as the successor of the Mozilla Skywriter project.

History

Known as ''Ace'' (Ajax.org Cloud9 Editor), it was previously known as ''

Bespin The fictional universe of the ''Star Wars'' franchise features multiple planets and moons. While only the feature films and selected other works are considered canon to the franchise since the 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm by The Walt Disne ...

'' then later '' Skywriter''. Bespin and Ace started as two independent projects both aiming to build a no-compromise

code editor A source-code editor is a text editor program designed specifically for editing source code of computer programs. It may be a standalone application or it may be built into an integrated development environment (IDE). Features Source-code editor ...

component for the web. Bespin started as part of Mozilla Labs and was based on the

<canvas 



Canvas is an extremely durable Plain weave, plain-woven Cloth, fabric used for making sails, tents, Tent#Marquees and larger tents, marquees, backpacks, Shelter (building), shelters, as a Support (art), support for oil painting and for other ite ...
>

html tag, while Ace is the Editor component of the Cloud9 IDE and is using the DOM for rendering. After the release of Ace at JSConf.eu 2010, in Berlin, the Skywriter team decided to merge Ace with a simplified version of Skywriter's plugin system and some of Skywriter's extensibility points. All these changes were merged back to Ace, which supersedes Skywriter. Both Ajax.org and

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

are actively developing and maintaining Ace.

Features

Syntax highlighting Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors that is used for programming language, programming, scripting language, scripting, or markup language, markup languages, such as HTML. The feature displays text, especially source code, in differe ...

* Auto indentation and outdent * An optional

command line A command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with software via command (computing), commands each formatted as a line of text. Command-line interfaces emerged in the mid-1960s, on computer terminals, as an interactive and more user ...

* Work with large documents (handles hundreds of thousands of lines without issue) * Fully customizable key bindings including vi and

Emacs Emacs (), originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor Macros"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

modes * Themes (

themes can be imported) * Search and replace with regular expressions * Highlight matching parentheses * Toggle between soft tabs and real tabs * Displays hidden characters * Highlight selected word * Multiple cursor selection * Column select and edit mode

Notable projects using Ace

Caret
* Cloud9 IDE * CMS Made Simple
Code Pad IDE
*

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

JoplinJekyll Admin
* KiwiIRC
LaTeX Base
* Leanote *

MediaWiki MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker,mailarchive:wikipedia-l/2001-August/000382.html, Magnus Manske's announc ...

mw:Extension:CodeEditor *

OwnCloud ownCloud is a Free Software Foundation, free and open-source software project for content collaboration, File sharing, file-sharing, and file-syncing. It's usable in distributed and Federation (information technology), federated enterprise scena ...

PythonAnywhere PythonAnywhere is an online integrated development environment (IDE) and web hosting service ( Platform as a service) based on the Python programming language. Founded by Giles Thomas and Robert Smithson in 2012, it provides in-browser access ...

RStudio RStudio IDE (or RStudio) is an integrated development environment for R, a programming language for statistical computing and graphics. It's available in two formats: RStudio Desktop is a regular desktop application while RStudio Server runs ...

Tumblr Tumblr (pronounced "tumbler") is a microblogging and Social networking service, social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and is owned by American company Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content ...

(theme editor) *

WaveMaker WaveMaker is a Java-based low-code development platform designed for building software applications and platforms. The company, WaveMaker Inc., is based in Mountain View, California. The platform is intended to assist enterprises in speeding up ...

Wikia Fandom (formerly known as Wikicities and Wikia) is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics (i.e., video games, TV series, movies, entertainers, etc.). The Privately held company, privately held for-profit Delaware ...

(CSS editor)
Lines IDE

HirenJS Code Editor

Notes

References

External links