GuideMay 30, 20268 min read

A Free Online AsciiDoc Editor That Opens Your Includes Too

AsciiDoc is the format that suffers most from editing on GitHub, because one topic is usually spread across files joined by include directives. DraftView's editor opens any .adoc file from a URL, resolves every include into a sidebar, and gives you a visual view and a source view. No Asciidoctor, no Ruby, no install. Works on phone, iPad, and desktop. Free forever for public repos.

AsciiDoc earns its place in serious documentation teams: includes, cross-references, callouts, conditionals, and tables that Markdown cannot express. The cost of all that power is tooling. To render AsciiDoc locally you need Asciidoctor, which needs Ruby, which needs a working Ruby environment. For someone who just wants to fix a paragraph, that is a wall.

Editing AsciiDoc directly on GitHub is worse than editing Markdown there, and for a specific reason: a real AsciiDoc topic is almost never one file. The page you are reading is assembled at build time from a parent file that pulls in fragments through include:: directives: shared snippets, reusable procedures, attribute files. Open the parent in GitHub's web editor and you see a wall of include:: lines with none of the actual content. The text you want to fix lives in a different file you have to go find by hand.

DraftView's editor is built for exactly this. Open any .adoc file from a URL, and it resolves the includes for you, opens every referenced file in a sidebar, lets you edit them in a visual view or a source view, and bundles the whole thing into one pull request. No Asciidoctor, no Ruby, no clone, no install. This post is the AsciiDoc-specific walkthrough.

Open Any AsciiDoc File from a URL

The editor accepts any GitHub file link in the form github.com/<owner>/<repo>/blob/<branch>/<path>. Both /blob/ and /edit/ URLs work. For AsciiDoc, the recognized extensions are .adoc and .asciidoc.

The quickest way in is to prepend the editor URL to the GitHub link:

https://draftview.app/edit?url=https://github.com/YOUR_ORG/YOUR_REPO/blob/main/docs/guide.adoc

The file opens immediately. No account is needed to read or edit. Sign-in happens only at the end, when you turn your edits into a pull request from your own GitHub account.

Every Include Opens, Not Just the File You Linked

This is the feature that makes the difference for AsciiDoc. When you open a parent file, DraftView reads its include:: directives, fetches each referenced file from the same repository in the background, and exposes them in a file sidebar. You navigate between the parent and every included fragment, edit any of them, and submit all your changes together as a single pull request.

That means the typical AsciiDoc reality stops being a scavenger hunt: no more discovering that the sentence you need to fix lives in _partials/install-step.adoc, included three levels deep. You open the page the reader sees, and the pieces it is built from are right there.

Locally, doing this means installing Asciidoctor, checking out the repo, and chasing the include chain through the filesystem yourself. In DraftView there is no Ruby runtime, no local clone, and no manual include-following. The browser is the whole environment.

This is why production AsciiDoc documentation (the kind that ships with projects like Red Hat OpenShift) becomes editable by people who could never run the toolchain. A contributor on a borrowed laptop or a locked-down work machine can still fix a typo in real, include-heavy AsciiDoc.

A Visual View and a Source View

The editor has two modes, with a toggle in the top left. You can switch between them at any time without losing work.

  • Visual view renders the AsciiDoc the way it will publish. Headings, lists, admonitions, tables, and inline marks (bold, italic, monospace, links) look like the finished page. This is the view for writers and reviewers who want to edit the content without thinking about AsciiDoc syntax: it works like a word processor.
  • Source view is a full CodeMirror editor tuned for AsciiDoc: syntax highlighting, line numbers, a code-folding gutter, bracket matching, find and replace (with regex and whole-word toggles), and multi-cursor editing. Formatting shortcuts are format-aware, so Ctrl+B wraps a selection in *bold* and Ctrl+I in _italic_ the AsciiDoc way, not the Markdown way.

Most prose edits are faster in the visual view. Anything structural (rewriting a table, fixing a conditional, reordering a list block, adjusting an attribute) is faster in source. Because both are one toggle apart, you do not have to choose a philosophy up front. Drafters live in visual; advanced editors drop to source when they need precision.

Works on Phone, iPad, and Desktop

The editor is a web app, so it runs wherever a browser does. The same draftview.app/edit?url=… link opens on a desktop, a laptop, an iPad, or a phone, and the layout adapts to the screen.

This is something a local Asciidoctor setup fundamentally cannot offer. You are not going to install Ruby on an iPad. But you can read a docs page on a tablet, notice a wrong command, tap through to the editor, fix it across whichever included file it lives in, and open a pull request, without a development machine anywhere in the loop.

One Pull Request, From Your Own Account

When you submit, DraftView signs you in with GitHub OAuth and opens the pull request as you. If you lack write access, it forks the repository to your account, commits your edits (across the parent file and every included file you changed) to a branch, and opens the PR from your fork. The maintainer sees a normal contribution from a real GitHub user, with all the edited files in one reviewable PR.

Your repository stays the single source of truth. There is no separate CMS storing a copy of your AsciiDoc, so there is nothing to drift out of sync. The OAuth scope is the minimum needed to fork and open the pull request.

Free Forever for Public Repos

Reading and editing are always free, and opening pull requests against public repositories is free forever: the full editor, the visual and source views, and the include resolution all work without a paid plan. Private repos get a 14-day trial, no credit card required.

In other words, you can use it as a no-cost, no-install AsciiDoc editor for docs PRs, full stop.

How It Fits a Docs-as-Code Workflow

If you want to preview rendered AsciiDoc while drafting, AsciiDoc Alive is a free in-browser previewer with Kroki diagrams and GitHub import, though for multi-file documents with includes, DraftView's editor is the one that opens the whole set. For a full comparison of free browser-based AsciiDoc tools, see Best Free Online AsciiDoc Editors and Previewers in 2026.

A clean end-to-end loop looks like this:

  1. Open the .adoc file (and its includes) in DraftView's editor from its GitHub URL.
  2. Edit in the visual view, or drop to source for structural changes.
  3. Lint the prose with ProseLint Web if you want a style pass.
  4. Submit one pull request from your own account.
  5. When the PR is open, share a DraftView review link so non-technical stakeholders can comment without a GitHub account, and merge with sign-off.
Capability DraftView editor GitHub web editor Local Asciidoctor
Opens includes too Yes No Manual
Visual + source views Yes Source only Depends on editor
No install / no Ruby Yes Yes No
Phone / iPad Yes Limited No
Opens a PR from your account Yes Yes Yes (manual git)
Free for public repos Yes Yes Yes

Who This Is For

  • Technical writers maintaining include-heavy AsciiDoc who want to fix content from any browser without a local toolchain.
  • Subject matter experts who can improve documentation in the visual view without ever seeing AsciiDoc syntax.
  • Engineers who want a real source editor with folding and find-and-replace for a quick fix, without cloning the repo or installing Asciidoctor.
  • Drive-by contributors who spotted something wrong in production AsciiDoc docs and want the shortest path to a pull request.

For the device-and-installation angle across all formats, see Edit Any GitHub File and Open a Pull Request: No Install, Any Device, Free.

Edit a real AsciiDoc file, includes and all.

Open any .adoc file from a public GitHub repo, edit every included file in one place, switch between visual and source views, and open a pull request. No Asciidoctor, no install.

Try the editor

Free forever for public repos. 14-day trial on private repos, no credit card required.

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