Today GitHub announced in "Edit like an Ace" that they are including the "Ajax.org Cloud9  Editor" (Ace) into their site! From now on whenever you hit the "edit" button on GitHub you will be presented with Ace instead of a plain textarea. We have been working with Github to help make this a reality. This is great news for all GitHub users because Ace is a fully featured code editor with lots of features missing from a normal textarea. This is also great news for the Ace project because it means a lot of extra attention, improved stability and more contributions. Finally it is great news for Cloud9 IDE since Cloud9 users will benefit directly form any improvements to Ace.

If you like this new feature in GitHub and you wonder: "Why the heck can't I do all my coding online?" we have good news for you. Cloud9 lets you edit, run and debug your projects online and has great integration with GitHub.

Cloud9 is quickly becoming a true lean-and-mean IDE with upcoming features such as run and debug support for many other back-end languages (besides Node.JS), true project-based autocomplete, and deployment integration with many cloud hosters. We also have collaborative editing like we are used to from google docs nearing completion.

You can sign in directly with your existing GitHub account. Once logged in you will see a list of all your GitHub projects and you can open them with a single click. For Github users, Cloud9 is the easy step up from just editing source, keeping the same feel of the editor but with more features of an IDE.

Ace is the editor component at the center of our Cloud9 IDE and succeeded the Bespin project from Mozilla. Our goal is to provide an editor which is on par or even better in terms of features and performance compared to existing desktop based editors. We are a strong believer in open source software. From the start we developed Ace completely in the open. Ace already has a vibrant community and we hope that GitHub exposing Ace to millions of open source developers will give it an extra boost. Looking at the language support statistics of today proves this point already.

If you happen to have stumbled upon Ace because of the GitHub announcement and want to get in touch with the development team, join our mailing list on google groups. In case you want to hack on Ace, for example by adding a mode for your favorite language, just fork the source and send us a pull request. Check out the "Creating-or-Extending-an-Edit-Mode" article in our wiki.

Congratulations to the GitHub team for this great new feature. Let's push the web as development platform!