
SubEthaEdit 5 – native open-source text editor with live collaboration feature - guessmyname
https://subethaedit.net/
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nullify88
With all the work from home going on, I recently discovered Visual Studio Code
Live Share which has been pretty awesome for pair programming and pair
debugging. It even has built in text and voice chat. Terminals can be read
only or read/write by people sharing, I can browse their workspace and folders
and it knows to attribute the author of a commit to a remote editor.

We were initially very excited about it and while we don't use it as much as
we did, to me its essential for doing remote collaboration / pair stuff.

[https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-
share/](https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/)

~~~
hnarn
For a more general use case (although probably *nix only, or maybe via WSL)
I'd also like to mention tmate, which is a fork of tmux that allows
collaboration/sharing: [https://tmate.io/](https://tmate.io/)

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qubex
I used this way back in 2003 when it was still called _Hydra_.

It was the first collaborative text editor I ever used and was a showpiece for
Apple’s _Randezvous_ (later _Bonjour_ ) implementation of _zeroconf_. I was
absolutely amazed.

I never used the collaborative features (much) but it certainly impressed
people when I showed them!

~~~
okennedy
I remember using it around the time they switched names. Although I barely
ever used the collaborative features, SEE's multi-cursor editing capabilities
were like magic. Yeah, other editors let you edit multiple lines, but SEE was
the first editor I'd used that gave you multiple _distinct_ cursors, rather
than giving you a single vertically stacked cursor. Top that off with OSX's
default emacs keybindings, and you had a super simple, but incredibly powerful
editing experience.

I eventually needed something cross-platform and switched to Sublime, but I
still have very fond memories of SEE.

~~~
qubex
That’s right! I’d forgotten how utterly amazed I was when I discovered
multiple cursors and how useful they were. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered
that feature anywhere else.

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krackers
Doesn't sublime text have multiple cursors?

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bjonnh
I wish we would have the equivalent of the language servers but for
collaborative editing. That way you could edit with one user in emacs, one in
vscode, one in intellij etc.

~~~
jpgvm
I once used something called Floobits[1] that was capable of this. In practice
collaborative editing wasn't that much more useful vs screen sharing and the
additional constraints of managing Floobits workspaces didn't make it worth it
for us.

[1] [https://floobits.com/](https://floobits.com/)

~~~
elviejo
What makes floobits awesome is that it could will allow someone using Vim and
someone using Emacs to do pair programming.

And if you can make Emacs and vim users happy then you can have world peace.

The only problem we had with it, was that it was only 99% reliable... And that
1% error (in the connections dropping and such) was annoying.

But I still consider floobits a project with great potential.

~~~
dunham
I did pair programming on XEmacs in the 90's by opening a new frame on a
second X server. It worked surprisingly well as long as both people stayed out
of the minibuffer.

~~~
teddyh
A.k.a. M-x make-frame-on-display. It’s nice, but it does not show the cursor
of the other person, which makes it hard.

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nanna
For reference, a long discussion about real-time code sharing in SubEthaEdit,
Atom, VS Code, floobits and elsewhere took place in this HN discussion from
November 2017:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15704730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15704730)

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casperb
I used this 10+ years ago, was really cool to pair program in the office. We
also used it to take notes in meetings. But liked TextMate better for
programming and then sort of stopped using it.

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oofabz
SubEthaEdit is a nice enough text editor that it deserves consideration even
if you never use its networking features.

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bibinou
It's free on the Mac App Store and open source (MIT)

[https://github.com/subethaedit/SubEthaEdit/tree/master](https://github.com/subethaedit/SubEthaEdit/tree/master)

I thought this was a new version and got somewhat excited... :(

~~~
jboynyc
Here's a blog post from the developer on the occasion of the open source
release: [https://rant.monkeydom.de/posts/2018/11/28/see-is-
back](https://rant.monkeydom.de/posts/2018/11/28/see-is-back)

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vanous
macOS only as per GH tagline:

General purpose plain text editor for macOS.

~~~
indentit
yeah I was excited til I saw that - the "native" in the title should specify
the platform too, really.

~~~
zapzupnz
I think it's left out because it's about 17 years old and most people who
would be familiar with the name of the editor already know it's a macOS app.

But you're right, that 'native' tagline is such a big draw these days, it is
probably worth mentioning the OS in the title.

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smitty1e
Relevant page on the Emacs wiki:
[https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SubEthaEditProtocol](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SubEthaEditProtocol)

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jrockway
I remember my group of friends being really hyped about this when it first
came out. I ended up writing something for Emacs that let people ssh into a
common server and each have their own "point" so that they could sort of get
the same effect in Emacs. Exactly 0 people ever used it and we promptly forgot
about collaborative editing.

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floatingatoll
It's so nice to see this app continues to update. Hello to ETcon'03 folks!

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solarkraft
"Native" doesn't mean much.

Please mention as quickly as possible that it's native _on macOS_. You do on
Github, but it's not immediately obvious on the webpage or in the title of
this submission.

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jhoechtl
What is the state of collaborative coding using (N)Vim?

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RMPR
While not tied to {n,}vim per se, I'd like to mention tmate which is a fork of
Tmux, and you can manage voice communication with mumble.

