If you’ve followed our previous posts, you may already know that SkyDrive.com now allows you to edit many kinds of text files in the browser.SkyDrive.com already offers Office Web Apps where you can view, edit, and share Office documents in a browser – so you can already edit text files in Word for the web. But sometimes you might want a simpler tool to edit things like to-do lists, sticky notes, and more. For these things and more, the SkyDrive.com web app now natively supports viewing and editing various types of text files.
This was one of the common user requests that Microsoft did. Best of all, besides regular text files, it also supports many kinds of code files, and this is also with a bunch of cool features like line numbers, syntax highlighting, and more. Using these features, developers can save, share, edit their code snippets, source codes with this HTML 5 based SkyDrive.com text editor on the web. Let’s check some details.
Open Notepad, enter something and upload to SkyDrive. Now open SkyDrive.com. This will show your plain text file.
Edit code files with SkyDrive
The real usage can be seen when we see the code file. As mentioned earlier, SkyDrive now has built-in support for viewing and editing various types of code files. It includes JavaScript, CSS, HTML, C #, PHP, Ruby, PowerShell scripts, Python files, .sql files, and many other code files. Code files in inbrowser will have features like tab completion, syntax highlighting, completion hints, IntelliSense, Find & Replace, “diff” to track changes. Download the code file to test these functions. Here is an example CSS file that can be seen in the SkyDrive .com browser
You can see syntax highlighting with line numbers. You can share and edit the file. As you edit and start typing, it offers autocomplete hints. Press Ctrl-Space as you do in Visual Studio for a list of AutoComplete options, or press Tab if you have multiple matches.
To find and replace, press Ctrl + F and you will see the Find and Replace window at the top right of the screen. Or, if you select the Match option, you can see all the matches in the document. On the scroll bar, all matches are indicated for its position.
Click the arrow next to the Find box to open the Replace box. You also have options under Find – Match Case , Match Whole Word, and even under Use Regular Expression , click on the asterisk symbol for that.
You have the option to replace everything too. You can also hover over let’s say a hexcode for a color – it shows the color for it.
You can share this code file with others by clicking the Share option, and you can also provide an Edit option so that they can make changes and save as well.
So when someone opens a file, makes changes to the file you opened, and saves them to SkyDrive, SkyDrive can help prevent conflicting changes. SkyDrive will notify you of the changes and provide an option to compare changes when you try to save your file.
When you click Compare Changes, you get a side-by-side browser view of the document and the version saved to SkyDrive. You can merge the changes by copying the changes you want to have with the changes of all users, or you can revert the changes.
So, as you can see, SkyDrive has so many cool features for editing code files. You must download the files – you cannot create them in the browser yet. As such, it can be expected that perhaps users will ask Microsoft to introduce this feature to create new text files using SkyDrive.
It has been observed that some languages, such as CSS, have more IntelliSense built in than other languages such as .sql. The latter do not yet have syntax highlighting or completion suggestions. Therefore, we hope to see improvements soon.
Also remember that SkyDrive is not an IDE and does not replace Visual Studio, but can be useful for code snippets, academic projects, personal projects, and more, as well as for sharing online.
