Is there a SubEthaEdit-like text editor?

Question

Is there a network-synchronized multi-user IDE available in the Ubuntu repositories?

If so, how did you find out about it? This is not the sort of thing that has an easy-to-search-for name...

Answer 1

I don't know about a real IDE (programming environment) but there are several applications that allow you to work together on "something". Some that I know about:

• The *obby family of applications (Gobby, etc.) are text editors, but not really usable as a full IDE in my opinion (although it could be possible to write an IDE based on its library?). Gobby is used at the Ubuntu Developer Summits to take notes.
• AbiWord is a word processor that has a collaboration plugin
• Coccinella (not in the Ubuntu archive) is a combination of a chat client and a shared whiteboard

And of course there are also several on-line web-applications for collaborative editing.)

Answer 2

I haven't used either, but I believe Gobby is similar

Answer 3

You're probably better off using a version control system (like svn or bzr) and just use a normal editor/IDE for your programming.

Everyone can then make their own changes in a separate branch that can be merged later into the main development version ('trunk').

Answer 4

I searched for "collaborative editing" back when I was trying to find alternatives.

I think the best you're going to get is something like http://etherpad.com/. I've tried Gobby, but found it way limited and unstable to recommend, YMMV.

I prefer emacs, and there have been attempts at working collab.editing into emacs, including using the obby protocol, I never got this to really work though (see http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CollaborativeEditing for some discussion). There's also emacs multi-tty, which is a great feature in general, but not completely suited for collaborative editing (unless you're on the same network and prepared to give others full access to your machine, the same goes for shared screen sessions, which are even more insecure).

AbiCollab ( http://msevior.livejournal.com/27859.html ) seems really cool, but mainly useful for writers, not programmers.

I'm still using git, pastebins and IRC :/

EDIT: I've started using this setup: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/tmux_for_collaborative_editing The trick is just to make a shell account where you only keep stuff that you don't mind sharing. Let that be the host, and you've got full collaborative editing with all the power of emacs.