
Gobby: A Collaborative Text Editor - vmorgulis
https://gobby.github.io/
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mherrmann
I would have loved to see at least one screenshot. Without one, there is no
incentive for me to further look into the project.

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neverlast01
I came here to say the same thing. This project is quite old (over 5 years old
according to some of the commits). I would expect a little more polish for
something that has been around for so long.

~~~
majewsky
It's actually older. I remember using this in 2007 to write lecture notes in
LaTeX in collaboration with a friend (our notebooks being connected by
Ethernet since the university did not have WiFi back in the days).

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arfar
I'm always interested to find out how people decide upon names for their
projects.

In New Zealand "gobby" is slang for a blow job, not sure if that makes me want
to try it more or less though.

~~~
pc2g4d
Wasn't gobby (the software project) originally named as a play on another
collaborative editor named Lobby? That's what my memory is telling me.

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ben0x539
The author's previous iteration of a library for multi-user text editing was
called libobby, so that it'd be manually linked with -lobby. It might have
been named some time after reading about libiberty and the like. Naturally,
the Gtk GUI app had to have a G prepended to that, and the name was kept even
though libobby was dropped in favor of a new, C-based library implementing a
more complete algorithm with a slightly less gimmicky name.

Maybe globby would have been a better call...

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Daviey
The Ubuntu Developers Summit used to use Gobby for collaborative notes and it
served it reasonably well with hundreds of concurrent connections.. but it did
crash on occasion. However, it did later move to Etherpad (Java based).. and
then Etherpad Lite (nodejs based).

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pdkl95
> Collaborative Text Editor

[http://bash.org/?85514](http://bash.org/?85514)

    
    
        <Reverend> IRC is just multiplayer notepad.

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kaoD
This kept me thinking... nowadays you'd describe IRC as Realtime Twitter.

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jessevdk
gobby may not be the best editor out there, but as far as I know it's goal was
to be a testbed/implementation of the obby (now infinote [1]) collaborative
editing protocol. The underlying library is quite easy to use and integrate
into existing editors, for example I once implemented a gedit plugin [2] which
used libinfinity to add collaborative editing to gedit although it has since
gone stale.

[1]: [http://infinote.org/](http://infinote.org/) [2]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXzI2dInXKI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXzI2dInXKI)

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baldfat
I have used EtherPad and found it a decent tool that looks a little nicer.
[http://etherpad.org/](http://etherpad.org/)

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ultramancool
Gobby is better than Etherpad if you're editing code though.

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dspillett
How so? (genuine question, the site shows no examples so without installing
the thing I can't see how it works)

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martinflack
Has anyone tried to do serious collaborative editing in emacs or vim? Any
success there? I'd rather not learn another editor just for collaboration.

~~~
akkartik
I teach programming long-distance using tmux on a remote server. That works
pretty well: [http://akkartik.name/post/mu](http://akkartik.name/post/mu)

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Daishiman
I've used this for writing term papers back then. Very useful little tool.

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chei0aiV
I wish someone would write a web frontend to the protocol, so we could use
that instead of websites like etherpad.org/titanpad.org.

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mdonahoe
This was great back in college, but I haven't used it since collaborative web
editors came on the scene

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Ace17
What's the point of a multiplayer notepad when we have editor-independent
version control?

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bildung
The use case is _synchronous_ editing. I've used gobby e.g. for writing
minutes during a meeting. Everyone was logged in and could see/edit the
current state. Very useful when dealing with dense/complex topics because this
way misunderstandings etc. get corrected instantaneously.

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Zekio
Wonder how well the Dedicated server part would run on a raspberry pi :)

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elsamuko
I have a pi2 with smb, etherpad lite, prosody and sshd and it uses 170 MB
after two weeks uptime.

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cookiemonsta
Weird (interesting) choice of name... 'gobby'...

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bau5
gobby pls

