Best editor for remote pair programming?

Question

Do you know of an editor that allows two people to edit the same code simultaneously sitting at two different computers connected remotely?

This can be used for code review e.t.c

The platform could be Mac, Windows or Linux.

Answer 1

What operatingsystem? Coda for Mac OS X have this functionality, and it works great performance wise - the only downside is that only the owner of the file can save it.

Answer 2

There's a list of such editors on the Code Complete site: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki$?VirtualPairProgramming. The only one I've had experience with is SubEthaEdit on the Macintosh. Worked pretty well, but I didn't really use it for pair programming. I tried it at a conference for collaboratively taking notes with a colleague. I saw UNA demoed at a another conferenced. It looked pretty cool, but the performance was really spotted -- probably due to the number of laptops sharing wireless in the room. I doubt it would have that problem in a normal environment.

Answer 3

You could use a VNC client to allow both people to control the keyboard and mouse on one machine.

Answer 4

A useful concurrent text editor is Gobby.

There's actually a page on The Wiki about this: Virtual Pair Programming with a list of relevant tools.

Answer 5

During a time, I use emacs daemon with remote X, all people connected to an emacs daemon.

Please also see this page on emacs wiki about collaborative editing.

Answer 6

There is Eclipse Cola, but I think it works only for the JDT (Java) Editor. In any case the demo they have is really cool:

http://live.eclipse.org/node/543

Answer 7

Ulipad have peer programming features, and therefor using comments and an instant messaging, you can make code review quite easily.

Ulipad is a nice generic code editor, a really a killer python code editor.

Answer 8

If you're working in a *nix environment you could always use skype for voice and SSH + GNU Screen with vim or emacs.

Screen has a multi-user mode, allowing several different users to connect to the same session. If the participants all use different editors, just set up a terminal with vim in (1), emacs in (2), etc. This has the added benefit of it being fairly unambiguous who's supposed to be in control of the session.

This is a fairly good intro to screen http://www.bangmoney.org/presentations/screen.html - if you don't use any other feature or customization, do make sure to set a status line (sessions can become very confusing if you don't).

Answer 9

http://www.collabedit.com

A real-time collaborative editor that allows multiple people to work on the same code. Extremely simple site to use

Answer 10

For another shared terminal implementation, there's kibitz distributed along with Expect

Answer 11

my no.1 is logmein (also i can connect via ipod touch / iphone) + skype or gtalk, firewall doesn't matter for logmein. You can connect different machine via logmein web site. Also it is secure. Another explanation is here.

Answer 12

There is a powerful Google owned online and web-based real-time collaborative text (not code) editing site called Etherpad:

http://etherpad.com/

Google bought Etherpad on December 7th 2009 (2 days from writing this post), and mentioned plans to make it open-source.

Answer 13

I've heard good things about SubEthaEdit on OS X. And GNU screen is a good choice if you're a vim-head.

Answer 14

There's a really cool online editor from mozilla labs called bespin. It supports collaborative development out of the box. It's still in development so it might not suit your needs right now but it sure is gearing up to become something really cool.

Answer 15

If you are using Visual Studio have a look at http://www.instantreview.de

A P2P based colloborative coding extension for Visual Studio.