Raspberry Pi Open-Sources its Code Editor

Raspberry Pi announced this week that it is open-sourcing its free web-based Code Editor, which is aimed at kids and learners.

“We’ve made the code for the Code Editor open source so people can repurpose and contribute to it,” Raspberry Pi’s Phil Howell writes. “The Editor’s front end is licensed as permissively as possible under the Apache License 2.0, and we’ve chosen to license the back end under the copyleft AGPL V3 license. Copyleft licenses mean derived works must be licensed under the same terms, including making any derived projects also available to the community.”

Raspberry Pi announced its Code Editor three months ago in beta form, stating that it was specifically designed to work well on mobile and tablet devices, and low-cost computers like the Raspberry Pi 4 2GB. At the time, the editor offered support for the Python programming language and Raspberry Pi account integration for saving projects to the cloud.

Raspberry Pi still offers the same two initial two projects in the Foundation’s Intro to Python path. And while the firm promised that support for web development languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript was coming in the near future, that support is still forthcoming.

If you’re interested in how Raspberry Pi built the Code Editor, definitely check out the original post. But you can also learn more about the Code Editor from a technical perspective via the project’s GitHub repositories. There are separate readmes and documentation for the front- and back-ends:

• Front-end readme and front-end contributions documentation
• Back-end readme and back-end contributions documentation

You can access the Raspberry Pi Code Editor directly at editor.raspberrypi.org.