ICEcoder IDE – Coding in the Browser

ICEcoder – A Good IDE

Icecoder is a PHP-based IDE that you can easily download. All you have to do is http://icecoder.net/ Simply download it from and upload it to the server. I create a folder in public_html and place it under it. Then, when you first log in from your browser, it asks for a password at www.exampledomain.com/icecoder/. You then log in with that password. I recommend creating a strong password.

ICEcoder – Login Screen

It's actually an open-source project that needs support. You can find the Google group on its website, for example. The code layout is very nice. However, if you're too disorganized in your HTML and push the limits of tags within tags, the browser might struggle. It shows the tag chain below. I ran into it once, and the browser crashed. But I should mention that my computer at the time was bad.

Coding

ICEcoder – Coding Screen

Coding is quite nice and fast. I used it to live stream a website I was building, and despite having 6,000 lines of code, it didn't even bother me. However, the save time increased from a normal one second to 2-3 seconds. I consider this normal. I tried opening it on a tablet, but I had trouble with it. Since double-clicking files is normally required, and even with a mouse on Android, double-clicking isn't possible, the only way to open files is to specify the file path in the file/open menu, like /filename.

Add-ons

ICEcoder – Plugins

There are a lot of plugins there. Moving the mouse to the far left opens a small hidden menu. Clicking the +/- button there brings up this window. Adminer-MYSQL Database Manager is a nice plugin. You can connect to and manage the database using your database username and password. I know it connects to a terminal server, but I haven't installed or tried it. There's something called CSS Beautify, which I installed, but nothing happened. It won't open when I click it either. I haven't figured it out. I haven't tried the others.

Mistakes

If, like me, you save by pressing Ctrl+S repeatedly, you'll need to break that habit and learn to press it only once. This causes an error saying it can't be saved. However, if you click OK and save it a single time, it saves after the error. I've experienced another problem a couple of times. It also shows that the changes are saved, but they don't save. To do this, you have to copy the changes, close the file, and then re-open it, pasting them in. Otherwise, it just won't save.

Overall, it gets a 9 out of 10 from me and I will be using it from now on. I recommend it to you too.