Introducing CoVim – Collaborative Editing for Vim | Hacker News Reader

Introducing CoVim – Collaborative Editing for Vim

fredkschott.com

126 pointsjamesbritt23 comments

This is really damn cool. It just comes too late for me. I have adapted to shared tmux sessions -- that allow me to work with shiver the dirty emacs users.

same here, and tmux lets you share more than just your vim session. We use it regularly for pair programming, some times even in the same office, each one at his own computer.

I liked that coVim launches its own server, so you don't rely on having to ssh to the same box, but at the same time, I imagine ssh should be safer.

We use the same setup and really like that you share the entire terminal instead of just the editor. Is there any good reason to use this instead of tmux sessions? While it's kinda cool i don't understand why people are trying to put everything in vim instead of using other complementary tools.

What seems to be the key feature is the text coloring, which I don't think you can get using screen or tmux.

Ah! ok, that's a major plus for CoVim then. Looks like I somehow missed the coolest feature.

tmux supports 256 colors with the -2 flag. I just add an alias in my .bashrc to make this the default.

I think he meant having different cursors, each with a different colour assigned to a person, and being able to use each cursor independently. not just colours in general...

Do you mean via wemux? https://github.com/zolrath/wemux

No, vanilla tmux does it.

Very very cool. I like their approach toward file management -- "we'll get the multi-user data into a buffer; you deal with it from there."

And now, of course, I'm wishing I had this before I switched my primary editor to SublimeText ;) Anyone know of a similar project for that?

I don't use it myself, but perhaps this is an option for you http://github.com/fatih/subvim

Floobits works with Sublime Text 2 and 3, emacs and vim and a web editor and Google Hangouts and integrates with GitHub + a permission model and a shared terminal.

So it's like Floobits but for only one editor? https://floobits.com/

Floobits also uses a centralized service with a web editor where as this vim to vim only.

So Floobits is like this but it's somehow associated with a startup and doesn't have first-class support for vim?

Does "first-class" mean it has to be the only one that gets all features and imply all other editors are second-class?

Too bad it doesn't use the Infinote protocol just like Gobby [1] and Gedit. That way, everyone could use their own editor while working on the same document.

[1] http://gobby.0x539.de/

It's a bummer, but it isn't the CoVim authors' fault that the Gobby developers chose irrelevance. http://git.0x539.de/?p=infinote.git;a=blob;f=COPYING;h=b124c...

I don't understand. You've linked to a copy of the LGPLv2.1 in infininote's git repo. Are you saying that their choice of licence primarily caused their product to be less popular?

No, I'm saying that it precludes it from being an obvious choice for a standard, since implementing that type of protocol isn't simple and there are editor writers who don't want to integrate LGPL code.

Surely if it's LGPL you can just link against it, no?

I was really hoping, based on the title, that this would be a coeditor which types code to you.

With CoVim, do all the co-editors see the same screen, or can they view different buffers?

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