SubEthaEdit 5 – native open-source text editor with live collaboration feature | Hacker News Reader

SubEthaEdit 5 – native open-source text editor with live collaboration feature

subethaedit.net

111 pointsguessmyname37 comments

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/

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/

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!

I came late to the party (I got hold of it I think in 2005) and I had the same experience.

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.

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.

Doesn't sublime text have multiple cursors?

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.

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/

i find collaborative editing most useful for online docs, like wiki pages, etc. not having to worry about locking makes a big difference when editing is fast paced

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.

What happens when network drops? Do you have a chance to merge conflicts? Or one version wins?

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.

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.

That looks nice, however for those interested, only the plugins are opensource and usage is not free. The good thing is that it shows what is possible.

Not every tool we use has to be free.

That is such a great idea. The need for a service like overleaf to provide an entire front-end + text editor is just ridiculous when there is already so much existing software out there. Multiple editors with realtime shared data + shared previewing tools totally should be a thing.

Try floobits.com is the implementation of this idea.

Wow that's pretty insane actually, thanks

Sounds like a good addition to the gobby/libinfinity project:

https://github.com/gobby/

This looks really cool. Do any text editors aside from Gobby support libinfinity?

Given that most links on http://www.infinote.org/ are dead, I suspect the answer is no.

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

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.

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

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

https://github.com/subethaedit/SubEthaEdit/tree/master

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

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

macOS only as per GH tagline:

General purpose plain text editor for macOS.

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

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.

I'm not sure why you're being down voted. Is a valid point, the title reads like it's introducing an editor (I haven't heard of it, so it's an introduction to me), but saying native and not which platform in the title when it's one single platform, MacOS, is pretentious. It happens fairly regularly with Mac OS things.

Relevant page on the Emacs wiki: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SubEthaEditProtocol

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.

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

"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.

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

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.

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