By Remy Sharp 14-Mar, 2014

TWDTW #2: Addons, Collaboration, Hardware

This week we released more experiments, discovered one experiment going wrong (sad face), little two day retreat playing with arduinos and where I’ll be about giving away some sweet JS Bin stickers and maybe even a t-shirt or two.

User enabled addons

Code folding, matched brackets, trailing white spaces, and more. We all have our favourite features in the editors we love, and CodeMirror comes with a great deal of addons that historically I’ve been careful about enabling (since it adds to the footprint of the jsbin.js script request).

I’ve releases a dev feature (i.e. there’s no interface, yet) that allows you to enable to lazy-load in a slew of addons from your browser console. For example, in the console if you run the following then refresh:

jsbin.settings.addons.fold = true;

Gets you code folding:

Or maybe you’re a Vim beast, easy:

jsbin.settings.addons.vim = true;

Addons will be documented soon, but there are details in the pull request: #1273.

First pass at collaboration

Giulia took together.js and implemented under an experimental flag.

Sadly, and due to no fault of Giulia’s, using together.js just doesn’t do the job properly. The way it works is this: whenever anyone makes a change, all of the text is sent and replaced in the collaborators window. This results in the cursor position being reset when this happens.

As it turns out, this already affects all the sites that already use together.js with CodeMirror (the embedded editor that JS Bin uses).

So we’re looking at whether we fork together.js and send a pull request to fix this, or go down the share.js route (which I personally think is highly likely for a few other reasons).

A hardware retreat

Well, we didn’t actually leave the office, but we did take a complete break from coding on JS Bin to experiment with Arduinos, Sparks, soldering irons, Johnny Five and lots of LEDs.

Overall, great little fun. Though none of us managed to produce anything that we’ll be recording videos for Kickstarter, we have now broadened the amount of things we don’t know!

Out and about

I’ll be venturing out of sunny Brighton to a couple of London events, and I’ll have a fistfull of JS Bin stickers (which are really nice quality) and a few t-shirts at Edge London and LNUG. So come grab me!

Totally aside

This shouldn’t be funny, but it’s utterly hypnotic…