IOS compatibility

[Gozala]

Ace could be a ideal editor on IOS devices (iPad, iPhone) if you just could type, but unfortunately virtual keyboard never shows up with ACE, also I believe someone had a patch for bespin to make that work. @gissues:{"order":96.27329192546586,"status":"backlog"}

[sergi]

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

[fjakobs]

could you lookup the patch for us?

[glaforge]

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

[fjakobs]

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

[glaforge]

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

[SunboX]

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

[SunboX]

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)

[bvibber]

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.

[bvibber]

(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.)

[dmmalam]

any updates on the ipad branch?

[fjakobs]

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

[andrewheiss]

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

[levous]

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

[hjwp]

+1

[matthew-dean]

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

[abacon]

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

[velniukas]

+1 need this pretty urgently too on iPad

[cranic]

+1 to the urgency

[PlayMyCode]

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.

[velniukas]

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

On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 2:53 PM, Joe reply@reply.github.com 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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[cranic]

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

[PlayMyCode]

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.

[cranic]

@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...

[PlayMyCode]

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.

[hjwp]

@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...

[PlayMyCode]

@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).

[SunboX]

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

[matthew-dean]

Yep, that's how many WYSIWYGs work.

On 2012-04-09, at 4:56 AM, "André Fiedler" reply@reply.github.com wrote:

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

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[matthew-dean]

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

[nightwing]

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.

[SunboX]

custom keyboard sounds nice!

[PlayMyCode]

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.

[PlayMyCode]

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

[PlayMyCode]

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.

[matthew-dean]

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

[au-phiware]

@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

[bertoltmeyer]

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?

[cranic]

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

[nightwing]

@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

[bertoltmeyer]

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.

[au-phiware]

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

[nightwing]

ace never used a canvas, it was bespin

[nightwing]

with 2f6a6ce7e0992a2eccbb8a517aa2d6f4954f1214 will not be scrolled out of view.

btw. one more reason to make virtual keyboard

[mike-lawrence]

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

[rcarmo]

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).

[velniukas]

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 < reply@reply.github.com

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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[mike-lawrence]

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

[velniukas]

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 < reply@reply.github.com

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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[bertoltmeyer]

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?

[velniukas]

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 < reply@reply.github.com

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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