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Comment by etothepii | Hacker News Reader

Why would I use this over VSCode liveshare?

Genuinely asking, why would I want to run video streaming if I can just send small amount of text deltas.

Live Share is great if your pairing session is extremely code-focused. But if you're jumping between the browser, terminal, IDE, docs, Xcode simulator, etc., you begin to want to see your pair's entire desktop.

So far it seems that this is intended as a type of remote KVM instead of a per-application collaboration. I've looked around on the site but haven't really seen any obvious screenshots. Maybe I've seen to much marketing pages and completely miss the 'click here to see how it works' link...

Edit: and as I suspected, on second pass on the homepage it's right there in the middle in the purple bar. And it does seem like it's "TeamViewer but for developers". I suppose in the spirit of 'pair programming' that makes sense, but I'm not sure how streaming an entire desktop is better than streaming only application state if you just want to work together on the same thing.

It is useful to stream the whole desktop because you don't only look at code while pair programming. We look at the stories in Pivotal, read slack, google stuff, read documents and so on, all of that needs to be shared also.

Haven't seen either Tuple or your solution, but I assume at the very least Tuple wins out if the two programmers aren't using the same editor.

And if all you're sharing is deltas, how do you discuss existing code interactively? Can you also share text selections and/or mouse movements?

With Live Share you see their text selections, but not mouse movements. (except inside the Draw.io integration [0], then you see a remote mouse that is drawn by the extension itself). It's a bit like Google Docs or Etherpad, but for code.

Also: other editors could implement the same protocol perhaps, it would be cool.

[0] https://szymonkrajewski.pl/drawio-real-time-collaboration-in... here it says it doesn't show the cursor, but a new update does

Live Share lets you see which files your pair is looking at and what they have selected. You can also share a terminal session if you'd like. At work we mostly do Live Share + a Slack Huddle for audio. I think it works pretty well.

Or “Code with me” built in to jetbrains.

Which works across platforms too.. which is nice.

It’s the only thing I’ve tried and it works pretty nicely.

For more complicated things that require multiple applications working in concert maybe?

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