Mile
Zero

In the time since I last wrote about Caret, it's jumped up to 1.0 (and then 1.1). I've added tab memory, lots of palette search options, file modification watches, and all kinds of other features — making it legitimately comparable with Sublime. I've been developing the application using Caret itself since version 0.0.16, and I haven't really missed anything from native editors. Other people seem to agree: it's one of the top dev tools in the Chrome web store, with more than 1,500 users (and growing rapidly) and a 4.5/5 star rating. I'm beating out some of Google's own apps, at this point.

Belle's reaction: "Now you charge twenty bucks for it and make millions!" It's good to know one of us has some solid business sense.

The next big milestones for Caret will focus on making it better at workflow, especially through plugin integration. Most editors go from "useful" to "essential" when they get a way for users to extend their functionality. Unfortunately, the Chrome security model makes that much more difficult than it is with compiled binaries: packaged apps aren't allowed to expose their internals to external JavaScript, either through script tags or eval(). The only real extension mechanism available is message-passing, the same as web workers.

Caret is already designed around message-passing for its internal APIs (as is Ace, the editing component I use), so it won't be too difficult to add external hooks, but it'll never have the same power as something like Sublime, which embeds its own Python interpreter. I can understand why Google made the security decisions they did, but I wish there was a way to relax them in this case.

I figure I have roughly six months to a year before Caret has any serious competition on Chrome OS. Most of the other editors aren't interested in offline editing or are poorly-positioned to do so for architectural reasons. The closest thing to Caret from the established players would be Brackets, which still relies on NodeJS for its back-end and can't yet run the front-end in a regular browser. They're working on the latter, and the former will be shimmable, but the delay gives me a pretty good head start. Google also has an app in the works, but theirs looks markedly less general-purpose (i.e. it seems aimed specifically at people building Chrome extensions only). Mostly, though, it's just hard to believe that someone hadn't really jumped in with something before I got there.

Between Caret, Weir, and my textbook, this has been a pretty productive year for me. I'm actually thinking that for my next project I may write another short book — one on writing Chrome apps using what I've learned. The documentation from Google's end is terrible, and I hate to think of other people having to stumble through the APIs the way I did. It might also be a good way to get some more benefit out of the small developer community that's forming around Caret, and to find out if there's actually a healthy market there or not. I'm hoping there is: writing Caret has been fun, and I'd to have the chance to do more of this kind of development in the future.