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Comment by Permit | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but be reminded of http://xkcd.com/927/ every time I see a new collaborative editor. Whether it's Cloud9, Google Collide, Collabedit or Space, one must sacrifice all the benefits of their current IDE in order to use this one. Wouldn't these sorts of projects make infinitely more sense as a plugin for an established text editor or IDE like Sublime or Visual Studio?

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Couldn't agree more. I wrote up similar thoughts a few months ago where I tried to outline a lightweight protocol that would be implemented at the editor level (as a plugin) to support common editor functions such as opening files, switching tabs, and of course real-time syncing.

https://gist.github.com/1999816

I hadn't even considered a cross text-editor solution/protocol. That's a fantastic idea.

I don't like it. People should be required to use Emacs to be privileged to program with me.

Rudel (emacs plugin), in theory, supports multiple collaboration protocols. They've already implemented one.

You misspelled Vim.

Clearly you don't understand that Emacs is a perfectly suitable Vim.

Why would I emulate perfection?

Also look at Obby/Infinote. http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/wiki/Infinote

I only think this would be a problem if different coders accustomed to different "browser/collaborative IDEs" want to code with each other.

As long as all of these stick with the standard filesystem heirarchy, everything should still be fine, but it would be awesome to watch them adopt a single backend like the Obby/Infinote protocol or something.

Thats why we use ssh/tmux for our remote pair programming. Works pretty well if your "ide" is already in a terminal

Definitely. There is a project at the FU Berlin. [Saros - Distributed Collaborative Editing and Distributed Party Programming](http://www.saros-project.org/) It's based on the Eclipse platform and XMPP.

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