From the source
I’ve been working on Replit for roughly six years now, and as the team has grown, I’ve focused on the IDE (what we call the workspace) portion of the product.
Naturally, I was increasingly preoccupied with the code editor.
While we’ve considered creating a code editor that meets our needs, the complexity involved in developing one, the richness of open-source choices available, and the size of our staff made it a fruitless rabbit hole to enter.
Our time is best spent elsewhere.
I have had the pleasure (and the pain) of using Ace , Monaco , and CodeMirror in production settings, sometimes simultaneously (more on that later).
In this post, I’ll go over some Replit history, my experience using the editors, and how they stack up against one another.
If you’re here for a direct comparison, feel free to skip to the end , where I recap and compare.
The story Prelude: Ace In the early days of Replit, around 2011, there was no code editor.
It was a pure REPL interface, a console with a simple input box.
Adding a code editor was an obvious next step, especially if we cater to more complex programs.
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