Devcon is coming in a few hours and we’d like to announce that the Remix IDE can be run as a desktop app (thanks to the awesome help of Philipp Langhans). This is a really big development!

The beta version has been released, please check it out and tell us your impression ;). As I said, this is still a beta and we need to do some work before making it a non-beta release, so, please use it very carefully!

Now both the online version and the desktop version of Remix come with the following changes:

Imports are now loaded in the browser explorer and thus kept in the local storage. So if you load a file from github and refresh the page, the files will still be there. And if you right click on the folder, a context menu will appear (like in the image below), proposing to discard the changes. And when you discard changes, Remix will sync the folder with the upstream version on github.

All file explorers support creating folders. When you select the option to Generate contract metadata , the generated metadata file is stored in the folder named artifacts (see the 2nd image below).

Activate contract metadata generation

Upon compilation, artifacts are available in the artifacts folder

Some of the remix plugins are stored and loaded from IPFS. We also have created a new repository for plugins: https://github.com/ethereum/remix-plugins-directory. We are planning that this repository will be where plugin developers will register their plugins . More about this soon — it’s still work in progress…

And coming soon — Remix IDE will soon be usable offline.

Please give it a try — https://github.com/ethereum/remix-desktop/releases/tag/v1.0.3-beta.5 (it’s available in windows, linux, osx) and please share feedback with us - https://gitter.im/ethereum/remix-dev

Stay tuned and have a nice devcon!