16 January 2012, 13:04

Node IDE Nide gets 0.2 release, now also native on Mac

Nide in action

Nide, an IDE for Node.js written using Node.js and accessible through a web browser, has been updated to version 0.2. The new release makes the IDE available as a native Mac OS X application, though this edition is "still at an early development stage". Originally developed as part of the Node Knockout 48-hour coding competition, the developers have continued to enhance the MIT-licensed project.

Nide shows a project tree view of a Node.js project with syntax-highlighted code for various programming languages, Mac OS X Lion styled automatic saving and version management, project tree filtering with regular expressions, and image and HTML previewing. A separate node of the project tree shows NPM packages installed and allows them to be added or removed and automatically updated. Another node gives quick access to the Node.js documentation.

Version 0.2 has a number of minor enhancements, such as the ability to manually refresh a directory listing, set an IP address for the IDE to listen on and set a user name and password for HTTP authentication when nide is running on a public server. Editor state information, such as the position of the cursor, current scroll position and selection, is now preserved when the user switches between files.

If Node.js and NPM are already installed, Nide can be installed by running "sudo npm install -g nide" and run with "nide init". The Mac OS X version can be downloaded from the project's GitHub repository. Nide runs on most Unix-like platforms where Node.js runs, but currently does not run on Windows.