gedit gobby collaboration

After some more hacking we have most of the functionality ready for real collaborative editing in gedit. Here is me and Armin collaborating (me with gedit and Armin with gobby, sorry, interface in Dutch):

In contrast to my previous post, this version now properly handles its sessions, does error handling etc. The only thing that is really missing right now is undo/redo, which is tightly coupled to GtkSourceView at the moment in gedit. We would need to make the undo handling less specific to use infinote undo/redo for shared documents.

When all of this more or less works, the next step will be to use telepathy tubes to allow sharing documents directly with one or more of your contacts. The idea is that you can offer a collaboration session to your contacts. gedit will then internally run an infinote daemon, offering a virtual document store made up of the open documents in the gedit window. All the necessary components are there, so it should be fairly straightforward to do.

To finish, a little teaser screencast: (youtube, ogv)

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11 Responses to gedit gobby collaboration

  1. Jeff says:

    It looks nice and usable quite well. Good job. But I noticed it kind looks like Kate in KDE. Will it support CMake projects and what about code completion of Python and C++?

    • Jesse van den Kieboom says:

      gedit is supposed to be a lightweight text editor first, anything else second. By enabling various plugins you can get quite a powerful editor. However, we do not aim at becoming a full blown IDE (there are better applications for that). Although we do have some completion in the next stable release, we do not do any smart code completion, nor do we support projects (there might be plugins out there that do that, have a look at http://live.gnome.org/Gedit/Plugins).

  2. Flo says:

    This is the most exciting plugin I have ever seen. Thanks a lot!

  3. randomdev says:

    This seems really exciting!
    I assume it would take a lot of effort to port this to other editors – in particular Vim – to allow for collaboration without having to worry about devevelopers’ preferences?

    • Jesse van den Kieboom says:

      Not much more than it took me to do for gedit (and most of that work is in the UI, organizing bookmarks, etc). The part that does all the hard collaboration work is in the libinfinity library. There also might already be obby plugins for vim and/or emacs (they just need to be updated to the new infinote protocol). There is also kobby for KDE which currently uses infinote 0.3 (maybe they’re working on supporting 0.4, not sure).

  4. randomdev says:

    Thanks Jesse.

    > most of that work is in the UI, organizing bookmarks, etc

    Sounds like that wouldn’t be much of a problem in Vim…

    > There also might already be obby plugins for vim and/or emacs (they
    > just need to be updated to the new infinote protocol).

    Some quick googling didn’t reveal anything – I’ll keep searching though.

  5. This is the definition of awesome! I assume this needs something like libinfinity >= 0.4 and gobby >= 0.4.93?

  6. Brilliant plugin. I hope I can get it to work :)

  7. Jose Silva says:

    Hi!

    Any ideia about the release date?

    Cumpz

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