var editor1 = ace.edit('code1');
var editor2 = ace.edit('code2');
editor1.getSession().setValue("this text will be in the first editor");
editor2.getSession().setValue("and this in the second");
They must be explicitly positioned and sized. By show() and hide() I believe you are referring to the jQuery functions. I'm not sure exactly how they do it, but it cannot modify the space it takes up in the DOM. I hide and show using:
As far as I understood the idea of Ace, you shouldn't make a textarea an Ace editor itself. You should create an additional div and update textarea using .getSession() function instead.
Duncansmart has a pretty awesome solution on his github page, progressive-ace which demonstrates one simple way to hook up an ACE editor to your page.
Basically we get all <textarea> elements with the data-editor attribute and convert each to an ACE editor. The example also sets some properties which you should customize to your liking, and demonstrates how you can use data attributes to set properties per element like showing and hiding the gutter with data-gutter.
// Hook up ACE editor to all textareas with data-editor attribute
$(function() {
$('textarea[data-editor]').each(function() {
var textarea = $(this);
var mode = textarea.data('editor');
var editDiv = $('<div>', {
position: 'absolute',
width: textarea.width(),
height: textarea.height(),
'class': textarea.attr('class')
}).insertBefore(textarea);
textarea.css('display', 'none');
var editor = ace.edit(editDiv[0]);
editor.renderer.setShowGutter(textarea.data('gutter'));
editor.getSession().setValue(textarea.val());
editor.getSession().setMode("ace/mode/" + mode);
editor.setTheme("ace/theme/idle_fingers");
// copy back to textarea on form submit...
textarea.closest('form').submit(function() {
textarea.val(editor.getSession().getValue());
})
});
});