Ace: IOS compatibility

We know, and it will be taken care of soon. Thanks for the suggestion!

could you lookup the patch for us?

I'm also interested in iOS (and particularly iPad) support.
Looking forward to hearing about your progress on that front.

You can checkout the ipad branch. It is not perfect yet but at least typing works. Use two fingers to scroll.

Excellent, I hadn't noticed the ipad branch.
Thanks, I'll have a look at it!

The keyboard didn´t show using the ipad branch. Using the master branch it shows, but there´s a bug with the cursor positioning. :/

Forget what I've said! It's cool that the keyboard didn't show up! You could write your own keyboard, much friendlier for programmers and less space consuming. :o)

Testing on iPad running iOS 4.3; current master fails to show keyboard or insertion point, and doesn't scroll vertically (I can scroll horizontally with two fingers, if the text is wider than the available area).

iPad branch hasn't been updated since February 3... testing it, I see that vertical scrolling works with two fingers (yay!) but is very slow. I can put focus into the editor and pop up the on-screen keyboard, but the insertion point ends up flying off away from the editor when the window scrolls up to fit the keyboard.

Trying to tap around the editor seems problematic; I can sorta tap within the line being edited, but tapping other lines above seems to _lose_ focus and closes the keyboard. I can only reliably put focus at the end of the document.

While scrolling vertically, the insertion point seems to jump up/down a line at a time, but when I start typing, it jumps back to the end of the document to add new chars.

(iPad branch on regular Firefox 4 also has issues -- it seems to make assumptions about the window's scroll position, and clicking in the editor ends up placing the caret at wrong position if I've scrolled the _window_ down to fit the editor in the visible space.)

any updates on the ipad branch?

Unfortunately not. This branch is currently not under active development. We plan to resurrect it but we have no estimated time when.

Sorry to resurrect a dead thread, but has there been any progress on the iOS front?

Obviously, there is massive interest in this. Ill take a look and see if I can help

+1

A web-based component that doesn't support the iPad can no longer be rightfully called a web-based component, IMO.

I second this. I'm writing on an iPad right now, wishing that I were using ACE to be programming instead...

+1 need this pretty urgently too on iPad

+1 to the urgency

I would also like iOS support too, and very soon. If I can find the time, I'd be happy to sit down and do this myself. So if there are any pointers on where I should get started in the code, and details on how it's going wrong, it would be appreciated.

Agreed - I would contribute to a kickstarter fund to complete this if need be

On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 2:53 PM, Joe
[email protected]
wrote:

I would also like iOS support too, and very soon. If I can find the time, I'd be happy to sit down and do this myself. So if there are any pointers on where I should get started in the code, and details on how it's going wrong, it would be appreciated.

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There's no way of bringing that damn keyboard up with javascript, thumbs up for a custom keyboard.

Not true. Assign an element as content editable and them give it focus, and the keyboard should appear. You could also do tricks with textsreas and text inputs to get it working.

The keyboard also comes up with the version of Ace I'm using on my site, it's just not usable.

@PlayMyCode If I can't call someting like ios.showKeyboard() than it's true that I can't bring it up whit javascript, this what you said are all quick fixes...

It just doesn't work like that.

If the content isn't editable, or if it's not a text input, why would the keyboard be displayed? The characters won't go anywhere, you will not receive input from the keyboard.

The keys have to go somewhere for the keyboard to be displayed. If they don't have anywhere to go, then it doesn't appear. If they do have somewhere to go, it will appear. That's not a hack, it's just how text entry works.

@PlayMyCode - characters don't necessarily need a textinput to go to, they could just "go" to javascript -- if you had a set of keypress listeners, you'd be able to get the characters and put them wherever you wanted...

@hjwp your right, but again it's not that simple. I believe the elements must be able to obtain focus, or the browser will not send the event to the element, and many elements cannot receive focus. For example the canvas will only listen to key events if you add a tab index (or at least I am finding this just now in Chrome). iOS also only brings up the keyboard for canvas if you set content editable.

Either was this is an academic argument. iOS support is what is important, and it shouldn't be sidelined simply because a solution looks too much like a hack (unless of course there is a better alternative).

How about putting the focus on an hidden text input and clearing this on keypress?

Yep, that's how many WYSIWYGs work.

On 2012-04-09, at 4:56 AM, "André Fiedler"
[email protected]
wrote:

How about putting the focus on an hidden text input and clearing this on keypress?

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Wasn't older versions of Ace positioning a textarea or input element under entry, originally? That approach will bring up the keyboard.

Wasn't older versions of Ace positioning a textarea or input element under entry, originally

new versions of ace do the same.
textarea goes out of sync with cursor while scrolling but that's easy to fix
i haven't seen ace on the ipad but on android typing and moving cursor around works, only there's no way select text.
but more importantly

• ace on android browser is super slow, fennec is a little bit better but still unusable (maybe using setTimeout here with longer interval could help but not sure)
• default keyboard and autocompletion suggestions are completely useless for programming (so making custom keyboard instead of trying to show default one seems like a good idea).
  overall i don't think ace can be useful on tablets yet.

custom keyboard sounds nice!

I'm skeptical about a custom keyboard. Building a good, polished keyboard is not trivial, and is worthy of being a large project in its own right. I would also expect a pure HTML keyboard will be slower then the inbuilt one.

It would also need to work well on different screen sizes and different layout orientations. For example I wouldn't want to use the iPad keyboard on the iPhone, and its not nice using the iPhone keyboard on the iPad. They have different keyboards for a reason. Most of all it means everything on the iPad and iPhone uses one keyboard, except Ace. In short, users already have a keyboard they expect, and in many cases it's customized (like setup as a split keyboard).

My recommendation would be to just get the keyboard working, as I'd expect this would be less work then building a custom keyboard. Then worry about building a custom keyboard in the future as a seperate issue. It would also allow you to optionally fall back onto the OS keyboard as an alternative to a custom one, such as if it didn't work well on a particular device.

This site also says you can turn auto complete and auto capitalisation off on particular inputs: http://davidbcalhoun.com/tag/javascript

A custom keyboard will also be unable to use the full screen width if Ace is placed within an iframe.

This might sound like a corner case, but both JSFiddle and JS.do.it allow you to embed editors within iframes on other sites, and it's something I'd like to do myself.

@PlayMyCode - Seconded: a custom keyboard would be an extremely bad idea for many of the reasons you mentioned and more.

@PlayMyCode - I agree, custom keyboard sounds perilous. I also suspect that those who have suggested it have little to no experience working with iOS APIs. But I could be wrong, im just going by what @cranic said about ios.showKeyboard(), the native APIs don't have anything equivalent to that... The closest would be calling becomeFirstResponder on a UITextInput control ...but I digress.

This should be entirely doable, probably with little effort. I'm guessing that it's along the lines of giving focus to an element that has contenteditable set. From iOS 5.0, contenteditable is supported, see the very end of Creating Compatible Web Content

There is a JavaScript for editing code inside a browser that fires up a keyboard on iOS: CodeMirror, see e.g. http://codemirror.net/mode/r/index.html for a demo (works on the iPhone) and codemirror.net for general. So maybe there is something in their code that could help iOS support in ace?

@bertoltmeyer, CodeMirror is based on textareas, that's why it can open the iOS keyboard, ace is a lot more complicated...

@cranic actually Codemirror2 is very similar to ace and uses, which uses the same textareas
if Codemirror2 works on ipad, fixing ace, to work the same way shouldn't be hard

I am writing from the perspective of an R statistician who - like thousands of others - uses RStudio for coding. RStudio is the most popular IDE for R and is built on ace. If ace supported iOS, so would RStudio Server. In this ideal world, I could just access our RStudio Server from my iPad and do all my coding from there. I (and thousands of other R guys) wouldn't have to use my laptop any more. So seriously, ace's lack of support for iOS is the _only_ reason why I am still carrying a laptop around and I am sure that there are loads of other people like me out there. So if I spoke javaScript, which I don't, I would be working on this with top priority. But since I cannot code in js, all I can really say is please please please please can someone try to fix this. Sigh. I (and others) would really support a kickstarter on this issue if necessary.

Hey, I've taken a quick look at the code but all I see is divs; where is the canvas?

ace never used a canvas, it was bespin

with 2f6a6ce7e0992a2eccbb8a517aa2d6f4954f1214 will not be scrolled out of view.

btw. one more reason to make virtual keyboard

I echo @bertoltmeyer with regards to enthusiasm for getting ace onto iOS so that RStudio can be used on an iPad.

I'd love to see this working on an iPad as well - it would enable a _lot_ of functionality in downstream applications (I also came here by way of RStudio, but just realized that ACE is in use in a few other web tools I use sporadically, so for me this would solve many different problems).

How do we raise a kickstarter of similar project for this? I'm willing to
put a $100 into the pot right now
On interfaces side - Prompt on iOS (a ssh client) has a great keyboard
which is better suited to sysadmin/programming than the standard iOS layout.

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 5:34 AM, Rui Carmo <
[email protected]

wrote:

I'd love to see this working on an iPad as well - it would enable a _lot_
of functionality in downstream applications (I also came here by way of
RStudio, but just realized that ACE is in use in a few other web tools I
use sporadically, so for me this would solve many different problems).

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@velniukas Good idea with kickstarter, I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few folks (like myself) would donate to such a project.

Unfortunately, I'm not able to commit any time to the development of a fix
just now, but I'd be willing to help out setup a project like this with
some collaborators.

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 8:01 AM, Mike Lawrence <
[email protected]

wrote:

@velniukas Good idea with kickstarter, I wouldn't be surprised if quite a
few folks (like myself) would donate to such a project.

---

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I would also chip in at least 200 USD to a kickstarter project for ace iOS compatibility. I am sure that we would be able to raise quite a bit of money for this from the R community. I am unable to contribute to the coding because I don't speak enough js, but I am willing to help with the fundraising in the R community if someone gets a kickstarter going. @velniukas , would you be able to identify potential collaborators and contact them with regard to setting up such a project?

Will do - anyone interested in helping setup a kickstarter - drop me a pm

Cheers
Steve
10xEngineer.me

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 2:59 PM, Bertolt Meyer <
[email protected]

wrote:

I would also chip in at least 200 USD to a kickstarter project for ace iOS
compatibility. I am sure that we would be able to raise quite a bit of
money for this from the R community. I am unable to contribute to the
coding because I don't speak enough js, but I am willing to help with the
fundraising in the R community if someone gets a kickstarter going.
@velniukas , would you be able to identify potential collaborators and
contact them with regard to setting up such a project?

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It's not a matter of money, but it's a matter of having enough dev capacity for this.

I know - but sometimes money can help people to be motivated to free capacities. ;-)

The fact is that this is a hard job and everyone has priorities. Get this done properly by hiring great talent. It's a small price between all of us.

Sent from my iPhone

On 10 May, 2012, at 22:18, Jan [email protected] wrote:

It's not a matter of money, but it's a matter of having enough dev capacity for this.

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One option would be to post a description of what needs to be done to vWorker.com and solicit bids so we can get a feel for how many devs would be available for this and at what rates.

OMG how I wish I could unsubscribe from updates on this thread...

@Gozala guess you are looking for antenna at the bottom of the page : )

can someone who have an ipad test http://c9.io/nightwing/ace/workspace/kitchen-sink.html
it is just improvement to ime but must improve typing on ipad as well

@nightwing Keyboard doesn't popup on iPad.

@nightwing Oh thank you :D You made my day!

@nightwing Perhaps I'll bring this up to @fjakobs when he comes to San Francisco this week. Getting the keyboard to show up on iOS 5 is extremely easy: http://c9.io/gjtorikian/ace/workspace/build/kitchen-sink.html Just add a contenteditable to the body, boom, done.

Navigation doesn't work, though, which is obviously more difficult. It just sits at {row: 0, column: 0}. I guess it has to do something with the <textarea> that's the first child of ace_editor that seems to act as a sort of cursor.

+1 for iOS Compatibility

Please note the januar 15 2011 commit at the @javruben fork, maybe it works?
https://github.com/javruben/ace/commits/master

@Gozala You can unsubscribe from notifications an the end of this page with the link "disable notifications for this issue"

In reference to previous comments from members of the R community, I installed R-Studio server version 0.96.228 on Ubuntu, and used Wireshark to examine incoming network traffic. I logged into R-Studio server on the iPad successfully using Safari. The keyboard pops up fine now, both in text boxes (e.g., for search) and in the browser pane that contains R-console. The problem comes when hitting Return when typing into the pane that contains the R console: the iPad browser is sending FIN, ACK which causes the R-Studio server application to reset the session. Any idea what causes this?

Any updates on this - I'm in favor of offering a bounty on this feature - if we can find suitable developers who understand the issue.

You can add another name to the list of people who would like to see ACE work with mobile browsers, in particular tablets. That said I'm sure this is not a trivial task. What can those of us who are interested in seeing this happen but who don't have the JavaScript chops to get it done do to help to make this happen? I would willing put money in to a Kickstarter project if it would help.

/cc @javruben

The last time I worked on this (admittedly year(s?) ago) I tested on the iphone and I got the keyboard to show up. Typing worked, but the cursor was offsetted and I believe inserting a \n would insert two.

There are the following problems to solve:

1. Keyboard to show up
2. Any typing interaction needs to be tested
3. Selection with touch events
4. For scrolling to be fast a new renderer should be implemented without a virtual viewport
5. Possibly add a fake keyboard for quicker access to keys used by the language mode (dynamic)

Please comment if you are willing and capable of helping with one of these tasks. I'll see what other resources I can gather.

Ruben,

I don't have an iOS developer to hand - but one of my web guys should be
able to help in the not too far future, once we get the next release out in
about 2-3 weeks.

Regards
Steve

On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 1:09 AM, Ruben Daniels <
[email protected]

wrote:

The last time I worked on this (admittedly year(s?) ago) I tested on the
iphone and I got the keyboard to show up. Typing worked, but the cursor was
offsetted and I believe inserting a \n would insert two.

There are the following problems to solve:

1. Keyboard to show up
2. Any typing interaction needs to be tested
3. Selection with touch events
4. For scrolling to be fast a new renderer should be implemented without a
   virtual viewport
5. Possibly add a fake keyboard for quicker access to keys used by the
   language mode (dynamic)

Please comment if you are willing and capable of helping with one of these
tasks. I'll see what other resources I can gather.

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/issues/37#issuecomment-7404954

Great news! I just want to say we're still watching and excited about
this. I see incredible opportunities for supporting iPad. I don't really
have a need to develop code in the cloud when I have a mac at my
fingertips. I am too attached to my toolset. But the ability to develop
using my iPad changes everything. Thanks for staying on top of this and
doing something incredible! Let me know if I can help.

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 8:02 PM, velniukas <
[email protected]

wrote:

Ruben,

I don't have an iOS developer to hand - but one of my web guys should be
able to help in the not too far future, once we get the next release out in
about 2-3 weeks.

Regards
Steve

On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 1:09 AM, Ruben Daniels <
[email protected]

wrote:

The last time I worked on this (admittedly year(s?) ago) I tested on the
iphone and I got the keyboard to show up. Typing worked, but the cursor
was
offsetted and I believe inserting a \n would insert two.

There are the following problems to solve:

1. Keyboard to show up
2. Any typing interaction needs to be tested
3. Selection with touch events
4. For scrolling to be fast a new renderer should be implemented without
   a
   virtual viewport
5. Possibly add a fake keyboard for quicker access to keys used by the
   language mode (dynamic)

Please comment if you are willing and capable of helping with one of
these
tasks. I'll see what other resources I can gather.

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/issues/37#issuecomment-7404954

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/issues/37#issuecomment-7414813

Rusty Zarse
http://LeVo.us
[email protected]
m:404-510-1134

I am also looking forward to this. Creating an app that requires code editing on the web. This is about the only thing that is preventing me from sending it out into the real world.

@velniukas any updates on this? Looks like there are so many people requesting this feature, and quite a lot of people willing to help. Let's organize and get do it!

@tzikis +1

This has got to be the number one 'must have' feature. Why? Because without iPad compatibility the credibility of ACE is completely undermined and vunerable to competing projects that can and do offer this level of support. As a company we are already looking at switching. After all this issue was first raised over 2 years ago and has shown no signs of going away.

@emeraldspy I appreciate the dead honesty you're taking with this situation. The reality is: you're right! Mobile support in ACE is a must. In fact, we made a call to the community 2 weeks ago to lend support towards this effort:

https://c9.io/site/blog/2012/09/the-ace-editor-hits-v1-0/

and the list of issues referenced in the blog:

https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/issues?milestone=2&state=open

Response? Zilch. While we at Cloud9 shepherd the project, we cannot dedicate ourselves to this effort fulltime. We can only make gradual improvements. So what can we do? What would _you_ do in this situation? We hoped that by creating a more open license it would garner more contributions towards mobile support, but this has yet to happen.

We feel ACE is a really special project and we want many more developers in the future to benefit from its exceptional performance and sophisticated feature set. But we cannot _force_ others to simply contribute mobile support. So we have come up with a few ideas that may work:

• Host a weekend hackathon dedicated to implementing these features
• Work directly with another company who uses ACE and can dedicate dev resources
• Rework our promotional materials (like ace.ajax.org) to bring this task to more eyeballs

This project may be suffering from the "bystander effect." That is, there is such a high level of interest in ACE, that someone will assume others will implement the new feature request. The reality is: only a few people contribute. Of course we love those contributions and bug fixes! But those contributions have not added up to end-to-end mobile support. Currently only Android works well.

If all of you who are reading this have ideas, please contribute them here. We do not want this mission to die in a silent "someone else will take care of it" whimper. We are motivated, we just do not have the resources to do this all ourselves. So we need your support!

So let's take some action already! And if you want to e-mail me directly about dedicating your own developers to this effort, then please do: my e-mail is [email protected]. And I'm nearly always in #ace on irc.freenode.net. Let's go!

Matt

We've done some analysis of the work required and came to a couple of
conclusions which put this later on our roadmap:

1. Navigation is going to be tricky
2. The DOM handling is difficult and slow on mobile
3. Tablet onscreen keyboards aren't set up well for programming tasks
4. Mobile wasn't needed as much as before - with mac airs & ultrabooks, a
   lot more people are carrying around full computers rather than a tablet and
   a keyboard, for programming tasks

We were thinking that if we developed down this route, a hybrid app might
be needed to skirt around some of these issues.
Can you reach out to me directly to discuss taking this forward?

Regards
Steve
http://10xEngineer.me
skype: steve_messina

On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 3:48 AM, Matt [email protected] wrote:

@emeraldspy https://github.com/emeraldspy I appreciate the dead honesty
you're taking with this situation. The reality is: you're right! Mobile
support in ACE is a must. In fact, we made a call to the community 2 weeks
ago to lend support towards this effort:

https://c9.io/site/blog/2012/09/the-ace-editor-hits-v1-0/

and the list of issues referenced in the blog:

https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/issues?milestone=2&state=open

Response? Zilch. While we at Cloud9 shepherd the project, we cannot
dedicate ourselves to this effort fulltime. We can only make gradual
improvements. So what can we do? What would _you_ do in this situation?
We hoped that by creating a more open license it would garner more
contributions towards mobile support, but this has yet to happen.

We feel ACE is a really special project and we want many more developers
in the future to benefit from its exceptional performance and sophisticated
feature set. But we cannot _force_ others to simply contribute mobile
support. So we have come up with a few ideas that may work:

• Host a weekend hackathon dedicated to implementing these features
• Work directly with another company who uses ACE and can dedicate dev
  resources
• Rework our promotional materials (like ace.ajax.org) to bring this
  task to more eyeballs

This project may be suffering from the "bystander effect." That is, there
is such a high level of interest in ACE, that someone will assume others
will implement the new feature request. The reality is: only a few people
contribute. Of course we love those contributions and bug fixes! But those
contributions have not added up to end-to-end mobile support. Currently
only Android works well.

If all of you who are reading this have ideas, please contribute them
here. We do not want this mission to die in a silent "someone else will
take care of it" whimper. We are motivated, we just do not have the
resources to do this all ourselves. So we _need your support_!

So let's take some action already! And if you want to e-mail me directly
about dedicating your own developers to this effort, then please do: my
e-mail is [email protected]. And I'm nearly always in #ace on irc.freenode.net.
Let's go!

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/issues/37#issuecomment-9084281.

Thanks Steve! I've added you on Skype. For all those interested in the results of our conversation (and any future conversations we have with others willing to contribute), we will post updates in a public forum (prob GitHub).

@mattpardee please do make sure you will post any updates. On behalf of the codebender team, we were interested in taking part in a hackathon like you suggested in your reply to @emeraldspy

Let's just fucking do this

@tzikis Awesome. We are discussing options with Steve, but a cross-national weekend Google Hangout hackathon sounds like the perfect way to pull this off. We're looking at options. Stay tuned!

update: to be more clear on what we're discussing, Steve has done some research on the performance of mobile support and we're looking at how performant a mobile client can be.

If we do this weekend hackathon I am driven to forge it within the next two weeks while the iron is hot. Ideally we will coordinate with @nightwing and @fjakobs to provide some guidance on best practices. Expect to see more about this soon.

I'm using ACE just as a syntax highlighter of XML files (read-only, no editing).
Everything works fine but the scroll in mobile devices.

Solving this issue should be a start. Scrolling is a big problem in ACE due to the partial render of code lines.
At least everything else is working for me in an iOS device (more or less).
Otherwise you could provide a way to render the whole lines (at least for small to medium files)
and try to the solve the problem.

I'm also open to collaborate in a hackaton. Let's do it!

Just a heads up. A hackathon is going to be a non-trivial event. Will be a
week or three at least depending on who we can get on-board.
Issues up for grabs:

• Simplifying the div structure to improve performance
• Bringing up the keyboard / custom keyboard
• Navigation

Possibly going for a hybrid solution with a keyboard along the lines of the
superb iOS Prompt might be the best way to go.

On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 9:30 PM, avillegasn [email protected] wrote:

I'm using ACE just as a syntax highlighter of XML files (read-only, no
editing).
Everything works fine but the scroll in mobile devices.

Solving this issue should be a start. Scrolling is a big problem in ACE
due to the partial render of code lines.
At least everything else is working for me in an iOS device (more or less).
Otherwise you could provide a way to render the whole lines (at least for
small to medium files)
and try to the solve the problem.

I'm also open to collaborate in a hackaton. Let's do it!

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/issues/37#issuecomment-9141191.

Hey @velniukas.

We are in the process of nailing down a venue in SF to coordinate the hackathon; we are estimating about 4 weeks from now. I'm putting together guidance materials from @nightwing and @fjakobs and developing a site to promote it. We are pursuing the idea of holding it over a couple days. The first day dedicated to getting as many features covered, and the 2nd to bringing these changes together into one cohesive piece.

So far we have developers from Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Greece, Armenia, and SF interested. So we are promoting this idea as an International Hackathon (perhaps the first of its kind?).

@nightwing has ideas on how we can get a more performant mobile implementation that would be a distinct piece from the way desktop browsers handle the virtual renderer. We will keep everyone apprised of his guidance and nail down a weekend very soon.

My team 5-7 devs is in: SF, Prague, Ukraine, Russia, India, Moscow, HK. 4
weeks from now is perfect for us. Plus I'll round up the local startup dev
community here in Hong Kong if we can get an agenda and rough tasks set up
at least 2 weeks before. Probably can sponsor one of the co-working spaces
for this.

Steve
http://10xEngineer.me

On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 12:35 AM, Matt [email protected] wrote:

Hey @velniukas https://github.com/velniukas.

We are in the process of nailing down a venue in SF to coordinate the
hackathon; we are estimating about 4 weeks from now. I'm putting together
guidance materials from @nightwing https://github.com/nightwing and
@fjakobs https://github.com/fjakobs and developing a site to promote
it. We are pursuing the idea of holding it over a couple days. The first
day dedicated to getting as many features covered, and the 2nd to bringing
these changes together into one cohesive piece.

So far we have developers from Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Greece, Armenia, and
SF interested. So we are promoting this idea as an International Hackathon
(perhaps the first of its kind?).

@nightwing https://github.com/nightwing has ideas on how we can get a
more performant mobile implementation that would be a distinct piece from
the way desktop browsers handle documents. We will keep everyone apprised
of his guidance and nail down a weekend very soon.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/issues/37#issuecomment-9147909.

Fantastic, Steve! This could turn into a landmark event. Given the time zones I would prefer to start very late Friday, early on Saturday PST and go for 24 hours. The site I'm working on will manage teams to pick specific tasks so no one is duplicating work. If anyone has done this before or has ideas for how this can go _best_, let me know.

FYI I'm still putting the details of this event together. Cementing dates, getting a venue together, e-mailing prospective teams, and building the website. When I have more interesting information I'll post here. Looking forward to making this happen!

This would be great. Currently I am having to use codemirror for mobile needs. Would love to use ace for all needs.

OK everyone watching this issue. We have a first step in the right direction with iOS _scrolling_ support. Before testing the link below, there are a few orders of operation & caveats to be aware of:

1. Wait for the entire file to load
2. After file has loaded, click the "Mobile Mode" checkbox at the very bottom left
3. Don't change orientation.
4. Start scrolling
5. I tested this on iPad v1 and iPhone 5. The iPhone performed brilliantly but iPad 1 was pretty terrible. More on that in a second.

https://c9.io/c9developer/ace/workspace/kitchen-sink.html

How this was achieved

• I created a div that overlays the editor with the following CSS:

#scroll_div {
     -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;
     overflow-y: scroll;
     pointer-events: none;
}

Rule 1 is required for the smooth touch-based scrolling, and rule 3 is to allow the overlay to sit on top but not receive any of the events we want to send to the elements below. This leaves open the opportunity to put in accurate typing support in the future.

• Built a custom inertia algorithm. This is the simplest algorithm I could devise that got "close enough" to what iOS does natively. It simply iterates over an interval of 24msec and decreases the velocity by 94.9% for each interval. The initial velocity is set based on the distance in pixels between the last touch and second-to-last touch (the math of this could probably be improved by incorporating the amount of msecs between the last two touches as well).
• Whenever the newest position from the interval changes, the touch-scrollable overlay is updated as well. This is so the custom algorithm takes precedence over the iOS algorithm and the divs don't get out of sync.

Influences

Joe Hewitt explored these same ideas extensively during his scrollability work, as blogged here: http://joehewitt.com/2011/10/05/fast-animation-with-ios-webkit

Why didn't I use scrollability in the first place? Ace depends on a virtual viewport and Joe ended up using webkit animations. The two are not compatible. I have to set the "scrollTop" position of Ace which then has to update the virtual renderer to change the position. I could have hacked in Joe's code to the scrollable div and then applied the results of his 3D transforms to the Ace layer, but eh -- the adventure was more fun :-)

Future

As noted this is just for scrolling. We still need to get accurate typing support in there.

For more modern iOS devices that can handle the speed, this approach works remarkably well. But there are definitely optimizations that can be made. We'll continue exploring options on old and new hardware alike.

Since this is just a demo and not part of the primary Ace codebase, the next step is to put it in the core.

Looking forward to getting your guys' experience on different devices and feedback for how this can be improved. Cheers~

Hey Matt,

Super happy to report this is much more stable on my iPad4 today moreso than yesterday. Nice work! I also tested it on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.2 and it's looking good. (Please don't let's make a solution that's iOS only.) Text insertion also worked flawlessly on Android, while my iPad had a weird double cursor issue (but I could still type.)

@mattpardee That is amazing!

Unfortunately, it seems to completely break Android browser (Android v4.1.1) and Chrome Mobile (v18.0, Nov 2012) support for me. Those browsers had minor issues before, but now I just get a big white div in place of Ace.

Awesome!!

@lennartcl what device are you using? And this only happens when you check the Mobile Mode option?

@mattpardee That's on the Galaxy S3, and happened regardless of the mobile option. But I actually tried again today, and now it seems to work as before in both browsers.

Great! Now I can continue with world domination.

I was just trying kitchen sink from master on iOS Simulator with ipad iOS v5 and it doesn't seem to start editing.

When I was hitting the live site kitchen sink with my ipad 3 iOS 5.1 it did edit, but always tries to capitalize the letters. Looks like it is continuously in a select mode with the start and stop blue copy buttons.

Is this latest code in master or should we be looking at a branch or pull request?

Hey Jeff,

Check out the feature/ioscroll branch.

https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/tree/feature/ioscroll

This should at least enable scrolling in the editor (and you don't have to select any options to enable it).

@mattpardee Yes, that enabled scrolling in the iOS simulator, but I could not figure out a way for it to bring up the editor to allow editing. I guess that is still in the works?

Yeah still in the works, although admittedly I don't know if I have the ability to get that working myself. Some of it is related to touch events to invoke focus or blur on the underlying textarea, but the majority of the hard work would be with updating the cursor handler. The distance of the offset of the cursor from its true editing position accumulates towards the end of the line, so there is something basic about the math it's doing.

Hoping someone is up to the challenge!

ok. thanks for the update.

Is there a way at least I can detect if the browser has the min requeriments to run ACE the browser so I can fallback to textarea?

@jfromaniello you could use Modernizr

Modernizr is a JavaScript library that detects HTML5 and CSS3 features in the user’s browser.

@faceleg yes, but what features ACE need.. For instance iOS has a lot of features but the on-screen-keyboard doesnt show.

Any updated on cursor position? Scrolling looks good.

Is anyone still actively working on this?

@MarkMurphy To be honest, I think not. See @mattpardee's comment above for the last state.

Concerning scrolling, what about the other way around?
Like creating div large enough such as height: 10000px; and scoll that inside another, smaller div. It's not perfect, though native scrolling would be much preferred over using extra resources to emulate it. See Dylan blog-post "Making Ace Editor Fill the Available Space"

At least we now know how the virtual keypad should look and behave like: http://www.textasticapp.com/

Just curious: what was the status of this? Is it still an unsolved problem for iOS?

If anyone's motivated to work on this, I have a hint and possible workaround. The problem seems to be that the keyboard doesn't come up when the ace textarea is selected by touch. However it does come up when the textarea is part of a form and it is selected using the "Next" ... "Previous" buttons supplied by iOS. I think...

I noticed this some time ago but have not been able to find the time to verify it. So YMMV.

my page have a select to change the language mode of editor.

when first load the page, the soft keyword won't trigger when I touch the editor,
BUT, after I manually change language from the select, then touch the editor will trigger the keyboard.

hope this will help.

Downstream bug for Wikipedia's use of Ace to edit template code modules: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55345

As a workaround we can blacklist Ace on iOS and use a plain textarea for now.

CodeAcademy.com is using Ace and they have it fully functional on iPad, complete with selections. I may look into this.

Any news on this?

This bug is also breaking Cloud9 IDE on iOS. :+1: for this issue to get some attention!

hello guys, is there anybody out there?

+1 also have problem with editor on ipad

+1 — We're using the Markdown mode for the editor and copy/paste is a big thing that's missing from Ace in iOS.

Can't use c9.io because of this bug. Kitchen sink demo won't scroll either (http://ace.c9.io/build/kitchen-sink.html). Happens on ipad and my Android Transformer (which is awesome for light-weight development needs).

For my web app, I used to use CodeMirror. However, I recently switched to ace because of the abundance of modes and features. The lack of mobile support is causing me to reconsider my choice.

Has any progress been made to enable scrolling on mobile devices? It doesn't work on any iOS or android device I've tried.

@mkaminsky11 +1. I'm also deciding between CodeMirror or Ace, and iOS support is the thing holding me back.

As @jakesankey said, codeacademy.com uses ace. I tried looking through the code to see how they made it work with mobile devices, but to no avail. Would contacting them and asking for help be a viable solution?

We serve Orion on mobile at Codecademy.

Is it fixed now?

It works just fine on my Asus Transformer, if I "Request Desktop Version". Too bad the browser won't remember those settings though.

+1

Hi, just for reference, I use ace for my project. The virtual keyboard issue is troublesome and I end up with making the editor to be content size. There might be a performance issue.

https://github.com/dai-shi/codeonmobile

This is still a Problem, seen on http://3v4l.org/

This issue is also blocking PlayCanvas.com (iPad Air iOS 8), which is a shame because the rest if the editor fully supports the iPad, and overall is quite an insane showcase of what HTML5 can be!

+1. currently investigating a workaround involving manually creating some scroll buttons, to sit next to the editor, using scrollBy http://ace.c9.io/#nav=api&api=virtual_renderer

+1 for scrolling problems.

+1 for scrolling problems

+1 for scrolling problems.

+1 for scrolling problems.

Hello guys, I'm not good / patient enough to fix the editor itself, since the whole concept of touch vs. mouse is different. But with the script below, you can get ACE editor to scroll on touch devices (IOS / Android). Just put it into the configuration section of the editor (where the editor is declared, and options are added).

http://pastebin.com/1Rh7UDea

@iq77 What is that code supposed to do? I am trying it and so far it makes no difference? I'm one of the people who really would like this to work normally on touch devices...

@tluyben on "touchstart" it saves the x/y coordinates of the touch event. On "touchmove" calculates the difference between start and end, then passes the x/y values to ACE's "renderer". The renderer does the scrolling. It works on my script, but maybe you have to adapt some class names etc. to your own needs. Also there is some jQuery in there, you might have to replace this.

This is a great thread, but I found it difficult to tell (a) what the nature of the "scrolling issue" is, (b) what devices/OS versions are affected, and (c) what workarounds are available. If someone would be willing to summarize where these are at, that would be superb.

I just tested the Kitchen Sink on [iPad Air 2 running iOS 8 and Safari 8] and [Nexus 10 running Android 5.1 and Chrome 40], and was able to scroll both horizontally and vertically (in landscape; I did not test with devices in portrait orientation). Steps to repro:
1) Browse to http://ace.c9.io/build/kitchen-sink.html
2) Add a bunch of lines (blank lines work fine) in the editor pane until there are more lines than will fit on the screen.
3) If needed, zoom out to view the full browser. (Editing the contents of the editor pane may automatically zoom you in, making it difficult to tell whether you're scrolling the pane or just moving the zoomed-in view around.)
4) Swipe up/down on the very right edge of the editor pane. No scrollbar will appear, but the editor pane contents should scroll as expected.
5) To test hscroll, create a long string of characters that's wider than what will fit on the screen; zoom out if needed; swipe left/right on the very bottom edge of the editor pane. I see a fading scrollbar on Android, but no scrollbar on iOS... but hscrolling works on both, regardless.

I've been searching through the issues and from what I can work out this is the definitive 'everything touch-related' thread. Correct me if I'm wrong and I'll keep digging / file a new issue.

iOS touch is seemingly unable to bring up the context menu in an Ace context (significantly, this allows cut + paste). Normally this can be triggered by tapping the cursor, but Ace overrides this behaviour to move the cursor forward by one character instead.

@barneycarroll, this does seem to be the touch related thread. I've been working recently trying to get at least some touch support implemented for scrolling. Right now, you can scroll if you scroll over just the right area in the far right or bottom of the editor viewspace (where the scroll bars would be). But that's not a viable solution.

I think I'm on to something with getting some touch support implemented, I have it working on the iOS simulator. Check out the fork (https://github.com/AStoker/ace), you currently need to build it to compile (as that is the source code), but if you follow the build instructions in the realm, it's cake. I would love some help with any improvements, as it doesn't seem that touch support is a high priority right now (but that's the benefit of open source, we can fix it ourselves). If everything looks good, I'll make a pull request to get it implemented.

+1 for copy/paste in iOS. The problem is the custom cursor handling? What would be a plan of attack to resolve that?

IPhone 6 plus ios 9.2 public beta seems to work well now with ace. Scrolling works and editing works as if your on computer.

Just needs improvements in copying and pasting.

It is possible to paste and copy but very hard to do it.

Http://www.apus.com
On Nov 19, 2015 10:52 AM, "paladox" [email protected] wrote:

IPhone 6 plus ios 9.2 public beta seems to work well now with ace.
Scrolling works and editing works as if your on computer.

Just needs improvements in copying and pasting.

It is possible to paste and copy but very hard to do it.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

I have problems with the arrow keys on my IPad keyboard. The keyboard works fine in every environment but if I connect to my cloud 9 Server and start to programming, the arrow keys are ignored. Can I add them somewhere or how can this be fixed? I need the arrow very often while coding.

<div id="editor" class="page-content" contenteditable="true"></div>

Does the trick in iOS. Just can't seem to get assembly_x86 syntax highlighting to work.

Where do I have to include this code? I thought this must be in the user.settings but there It has no HTML parts

HTML inside a WebView.

Can't get it to work inside a UIWebView 👎 It starts ok, but as soon as I try to move the cursor, everything fails. I cannot write, or with @jcss-org-il solution (<div id="editor" class="page-content" contenteditable="true"></div>) the cursor moves outside the editor.

Can someone help me solve a mystery? The GitHub online code editor, allegedly based on Ace (https://github.com/blog/905-edit-like-an-ace), is amazing. It runs flawlessly on the iPad, including with a Bluetooth keyboard, the arrow keys work (including Ctrl-Left Arrow, Alt-Left Arrow, etc), and performance is great, etc.

Here's a screenshot of an iPad editing session of the README.md file of this repo: (https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/edit/master/Readme.md)

And yet, everyone on this thread (myself included), can't get Ace to run on an iPad without problems (e.g., arrow keys don't work). (I have the same issues as reported here: https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/issues/37#issuecomment-195258878)

Is GitHub running a custom version of Ace? Is that version publicly available? I'd love to run whatever they're running! (Screenshot of DOM inspector confirming that it appears to be running Ace at bottom.)

Thank you so much!
G

@realgenekim from screenshot it looks like github uses a textarea on ipad

@nightwing Fascinating theory! But, if you look at the editor control, there are line numbers, Ace-like capabilities that seem like it's not just a standard HTML textarea, like tab width, text wrapping...

Upon some closer inspection, I'm pretty sure it's something more exotic than textarea!

@realgenekim line numbers are only in the second screenshot, which doesn't look like ipad

@nightwing Holy cow. That's so intriguing — I think you're absolutely correct. I'll try to get some confirmation of this from someone at GitHub...

I think this means I'll try doing the same thing. I.e., detect at run-time whether it's an iPad, and not load Ace editor, and instead just use a textarea.

So unsatisfying, but at least it will be usable until someone comes up with a good iPad solution...

😦

Just tested this on my iPad pro and it basically shows an basic textarea. Maybe with auto grow.

Is it something clever like a textarea with 0 opacity & an ace editor instance positioned immediately behind it? I imagine with modern iPad performance it would be possible to persist state (inner scroll & content) almost instantly on each input event…

@barneycarroll No, at least in my tests I was editing inside a normal text area without line numbers etc.

Hey guys! I've just created a pull request that fixes some of the issues on iOS. It provides a nice user experience, if you've an external keyboard.

If you like it, I might think of fixing the remaining issues :)

You can see it in action on https://ipad-undo.gomix.me

Enjoy!

Just using your demo and I'm seeing a problem with the insertion point. Create a pair of quotes, for example, put the cursor between them, and start typing. It randomly jumps to the end of the line. I'm not sure if this change introduces that problem or if it was there initially.

Oh, thanks @IamNaN , that bug has been reported in the PR right now :) I think I know how to fix it... stay tuned on the demo :)

EDIT: demo fixed :)

@etamponi That look awesome! Does it work with:

1. Plug in like vim and emac?
2. IME support with CKJ？

Currently it looks like it messes up when you turn on IME.

@episodeyang I am really sorry I left you on hold on this.

Unfortunately I didn't have the time to keep working on the PR... Luckily someone else took over my work and finished it, now it is merged as #3310 if I remember correctly :)

vim was already unsupported on iOS, and the PR doesn't add support for it. I don't know enough about IME to know for sure if my PR affected it in any way, sorry!

Placing the cursor mid-word via a tap seems to be hit-or-miss (iOS 11.2, Safari) on the demo provided by @etamponi - Is there a way to make that more reliable?

Currently ace works well enough on IOS to close this issue about the basic compatibility. If you see any bugs or missing features, please open a new issue.