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Gobby: Open-Source, Cross-Platform Collaborative Text Editing!

posted by rajbot on June 29th, 2008  

Shag and I were collaboratively hacking on a new radio station for the archive, and we needed a collaborative text editor. SubEthaEdit is great, but Mac-only. Shag found Gobby, which is a like an open-source SubEtha that works great on Linux.

If you haven’t used a collaborative editor before, multiple authors can work on the same files, and everyone sees each others edits in real time, differentiated by background color. Gobby has syntax highlighting, integrated chat, over-the-wire encryption, and is a pretty solid text editor too. We love it! Here are some ideas we had for future patches:

  • indent-region
  • sound cue upon message receipt
  • auto-indent
  • birds-eye view of the file to watch changes go in
  • function dropdown

As soon as we get indent-region and function dropdowns patched in, I’ll switch my main unix editor from KDevelop to Gobby.

Filed under: all talk, no code |
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11 Responses to “Gobby: Open-Source, Cross-Platform Collaborative Text Editing!”

  1. rajbot
    June 29th, 2008 | 11:39 am

    RE: auto-indent. It looks like Gobby uses GtkSourceView, which already supports auto-indent. We can turn it on using gtk_source_view_set_auto_indent()

    http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtksourceview-2.0/stable/GtkSourceView.html#gtk-source-view-set-auto-indent

  2. Tomm
    June 29th, 2008 | 12:54 pm

    Sweet! That’s so much nicer than using google docs. And I agree, region-indent is so important - how do people code without it?

  3. shag
    June 29th, 2008 | 10:33 pm

    nice find raj! have yet to clone the source trees..

  4. rajbot
    June 29th, 2008 | 11:26 pm

    Some more ideas:

    • Comment/Uncomment lines
    • some amount of git integration. It would be great if it could launch a git diff in Meld.
    • support for gedit plugins? (this would give us indent-region)
  5. ben
    June 30th, 2008 | 6:21 am

    Gobby is pretty cool. If you are interest in a browser based alternative, I created one a few months ago. http://collabedit.com

    It is a work in progress, let me know what features you’d like to see.

  6. rajbot
    June 30th, 2008 | 10:10 am

    Wow, CollabEdit is great. Good work Ben!

    As for feature requests, we love the Gobby chat window :)

  7. rajbot
    June 30th, 2008 | 2:54 pm

    Some more gobby feature requests:

    • -file transfer
    • -chat typing indicator (or real-time per-keystroke chat)
    • -chat colors ( should match background color?)
  8. rajbot
    June 30th, 2008 | 2:58 pm

    Also: show invisibles/show spaces

  9. rajbot
    June 30th, 2008 | 3:23 pm

    Also: undo/redo (what do you do about conflicts?)

  10. rajbot
    July 3rd, 2008 | 12:01 am

    Oh. GtkSourceView’s auto-indent is different from what we were talking about..

  11. rajbot
    July 28th, 2008 | 1:43 pm

    Fired up Gobby again. One more feature request from shag: audio notification for incoming chat msg.

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