collaborative text editing with Vim?

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John Magolske

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Jul 24, 2009, 12:58:39 PM7/24/09
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In a recent post on Hacker News [1] about EtherPad [2], a real-time
group-oriented writing collaboration service, someone mentioned a
way to use emacs & GNU screen to get a similar functionality --
users ssh into a server, share gnu screen sessions, start emacs &
emacsclient, and "everyone has full access to their own emacs, but
share buffers with everyone else...simultaneously edit the same
buffers..." [3] Later down in the comments someone asked if there
were any collaborative text editing plugins for vim [4].

So I was wondering if there might be a way to accomplish at least
some of the functionality of EtherPad using Vim -- multiple people
editing the same document with changes reflected on everyone's screen
in real-time. There's DocSynch [5] and some mention of integrating
it with Vim [6], but that project seems to be inactive.

Thoughts?

John


[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=719826
[2] http://etherpad.com/
[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720764
[4] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720381
[5] http://docsynch.sourceforge.net/
[6] http://docsynch.sourceforge.net/index.php?page%5B%5D=6.Implementations&page%5B%5D=2.VIM


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John Magolske
http://B79.net/contact

Rafael G.

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Jul 24, 2009, 6:00:41 PM7/24/09
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Some friends of me do pair programming with vim+screen.
I don't know exactly how we do it and if they edit the file at the same
time.


--
Rafa

Jason Axelson

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Jul 25, 2009, 2:01:39 AM7/25/09
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On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Rafael G.<r...@aspgems.com> wrote:
> Some friends of me do pair programming with vim+screen.
> I don't know exactly how we do it and if they edit the file at the same
> time.

If two or more people are logged onto the same user account (via ssh
or whatever). Then one person runs screen and the other person runs
screen -x (which will connect to the original instance of screen).
Then what is being typed will show up on both peoples screens. You can
use vim this way to edit documents. But this isn't really what the OP
wants because the two will have to take turns, especially since vim is
modal. I believe that the OP wants a way to only share buffers, which
would be a non-trivial task.

Jason

Rafael G.

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Jul 25, 2009, 7:41:02 AM7/25/09
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I was not sure about if it was a collaborative environment or not.
Thanks for the explanation :)

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Rafa

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