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

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

. 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 general-purpose Graphical user interface, GUI text editor for macOS created by Allan Odgaard. TextMate features declarative programming, declarative customizations, Tab (GUI), tabs for open documents, recordable Macro (computer scien ...

, Vim, or

Eclipse An eclipse is an astronomical event that 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 ce ...

. It can be easily embedded in any web page and JavaScript application. Ace is developed as the primary editor for

Cloud9 IDE Cloud9 IDE is an Online IDE (integrated development environment), published as open source from version 2.0, until version 3.0. It supports multiple programming languages, including C, C++, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, JavaScript with Node.js, an ...

and as the successor of the

Mozilla Skywriter Mozilla Skywriter (formerly Bespin) was a Mozilla Labs project aiming to create an open, extensible, and interoperable web-based framework for code editing. As of January 2011, it has been merged into Ajax.org's Ace and Cloud9 IDE projects. N ...

project.

History

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 Disney ...

or lately

Skywriter ''Skywriter'' is the seventh studio album by The Jackson 5, released by Motown on March 29, 1973. Background Lead singer Michael's vocals were now showing the signs of his maturing tenor voice, while Jermaine's voice had become deeper in ton ...

, it is now known as Ace (Ajax.org Cloud9 Editor). 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) or web browser. Source-code ed ...

component for the web. Bespin started as part of

Mozilla Labs Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, wi ...

and was based on the

<canvas 



Canvas is an extremely durable  plain-woven fabric used for making  sails, tents,  marquees, backpacks,  shelters, as a support for oil painting and for other items for which sturdiness is required, as well as in such fashion objects as handbags ...
>

tag, while Ace is the Editor component of the

and is using the

DOM Dom or DOM may refer to: People and fictional characters * Dom (given name), including fictional characters * Dom (surname) * Dom La Nena (born 1989), stage name of Brazilian-born cellist, singer and songwriter Dominique Pinto * Dom people, an et ...

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 have been merged back to Ace now, which supersedes Skywriter. Both Ajax.org and

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, wi ...

are actively developing and maintaining Ace.

Features

Syntax highlighting Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors that are used for programming, scripting, or markup languages, such as HTML. The feature displays text, especially source code, in different colours and fonts according to the category of terms ...

. * Auto indentation and outdent. * An optional

command line A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...

. * 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
*

CMS Made Simple CMS Made Simple (CMSMS) is a free, open source (GPL) content management system (CMS) to provide developers, programmers and site owners a web-based development and administration area. In 2017 it won the CMS Critic annual award for Best Open S ...

Code Pad IDE
*

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

* Halon
JoplinJekyll Admin
*

KiwiIRC Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called ''channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and ...

LaTeX Base
* Leanote *

MediaWiki MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki ...

mw:Extension:CodeEditor *

OwnCloud ownCloud is an open-source software product for sharing and syncing of files in distributed and federated enterprise scenarios. It allows companies and remote end-users to organize their documents on servers, computers and mobile devices and w ...

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 to s ...

RStudio RStudio is an integrated development environment for R, a programming language for statistical computing and graphics. It is available in two formats: RStudio Desktop is a regular desktop application while RStudio Server runs on a remote server ...

Radiant CMS Radiant is a free software content management system written in Ruby created and designed by John W. Long as a Ruby on Rails web application. Radiant has a lightweight core library with "extensions" providing additional customised functionalit ...

Tumblr Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a sho ...

(theme editor) *

WaveMaker WaveMaker is an enterprise grade Java low code platform for building software applications and platforms. WaveMaker Inc. is headquartered in Mountain View, California. For enterprises, WaveMaker is a low code platform that aims to accelerate the ...

Wikia Fandom (formerly known as Wikicities before 2007 and later Wikia before 2019) is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics (i.e. video games, TV series, movies, entertainers, etc.). Its domain is operated by Fandom, ...

(CSS editor)
Lines IDE

Notes

References

External links