Gobby: A Collaborative Text Editor | Hacker News Reader

Gobby: A Collaborative Text Editor

gobby.github.io

89 pointsvmorgulis43 comments

I would have loved to see at least one screenshot. Without one, there is no incentive for me to further look into the project.

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.

The development has really dropped off, and I doubt they're many users out there in the world.

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).

Just search "Gobby text editor" on google images.

Not a very pretty editor, would be awesome if someone made plugins for various editors based on the library if at all possible

Someone did! There's an editor for Emacs called Rudel that's supposed to work with the Gobby protocol. I've never gotten it working.

Or even better, an animated gif showing it in action.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCDEgvz_Rqw

https://screenshots.debian.net/package/gobby

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.

Australia too.

UK slang, in some regions at least, for someone who talks a lot, perhaps when they ought not, thus usually somewhat in pejoration - "She's a right gobby cow, she is."

In the US that'd be 'gabby' for a similar meaning, though rarely heard.

I've definitely heard of someone having the "gift of the gab", meaning they speak convincingly (I think I've only heard it used to describe sales people though).

"gift of the gab" can be positive, meaning a confident successful communicator (and sometimes socialiser) though tone of voice can turn it negative, meaning someone who successfully communicates bullshit (got instance in a marketing context).

Gobby is pretty much always negative, meaning loud, never shutting up, often also implying overly opinionated and/or obnoxious.

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.

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...

That's the thing with languages. Laura means penis in Hindi (or the tip of it), and it's kind of a proper word, not just a slang. Randi means prostitute, another proper word. These are the names people must have chosen for their children at some point.

So people usually just pick a name that is not a slang or offensive or heavily inappropriate in the languages, cultures known to them.

Randi isn't _that_ surprising

gobby was/is the testbed editor for the protocol originally called obby (now infinote). As many GNOME based applications of the time, names where usually prefixed with a 'g', hence gobby.

Where did they get obby from?

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).

> Collaborative Text Editor

http://bash.org/?85514

    <Reverend> IRC is just multiplayer notepad.

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

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/ [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXzI2dInXKI

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

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

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

I am so sold on git I couldn't see myself using anything like this for code. What is your use case like?

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.

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

For emacs, we have Rudel, which is even compatible with Gobby.

http://rudel.sourceforge.net/ http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Rudel

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

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

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

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

immediate feedback.

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.

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

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

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

gobby pls

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