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Writing Fiction Using SubEthaEdit

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the amusing-stuff dept.

Phil Shapiro writes "The recent blizzard on the East Coast makes for some great collaborative creativity opportunities of various sorts, including group fiction writing using SubEthaEdit. Did you know you can write fiction about collaborative fiction writing using collaborative fiction writing tools? We didn't either." Man, the best fiction I've ever produced is some of the project plans created using SubEtha.

6 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. For those who don't know... by diamondsw · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...this is SubEthaEdit. It's a rendezvous and network-aware text editor designed for collaborative coding that seems to be finding more use. Meanwhile, it's also just a damn nice text editor for general use, and is free (yes, I know that TextWrangler is also free now).

    --
    I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
    1. Re:For those who don't know... by Ford+Prefect · · Score: 3, Informative

      Meanwhile, it's also just a damn nice text editor for general use, and is free

      You do have to pay for a commercial use licence - only saying this because I'm one of those people who has registered!

      It's a great text editor just by itself, but since nobody I work with has a Mac it's a little annoying that my copy stays offline. Still, it was well worth the registration fee anyway, and supporting other programmers financially gives one that warm-and-fuzzy feeling you only get with registering non-nagging shareware. ;-)

      --
      Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
  2. This only solves the technical problem. by iJames · · Score: 3, Informative
    The real problem with collaborative fiction is finding collaborators who aren't idiots, and then getting good work out of it. The "article" linked was stilted and the humor was inane.

    Sure, there are projects suited to live collaboration. Screenplays, songs, even blog fiction (self plug). But prose narrative is one of the least likely. Name one good novel that was written by committee.

  3. Re:Sorry by Teppy · · Score: 3, Informative

    Collaborative text editors were a hot research topic about 8-10 years ago, and it turns out to be quite hard to get them right.

    The only mostly-finished one I could find that runs on Windows (and Linux!) is MoonEdit. Anyone want to put a server up and try it?

  4. IT JUST WORKS™ by jdwest · · Score: 4, Informative

    On a whim, I installed SubEthaEdit for a recent collaborative project for use on a P'book and a friend's iBook. Both of us were editing (wirelessly) the same document within five minutes -- w/o reading a line from TFM . Nothing scientific to back it up, but we agreed that it saved us a good amount of total project time (and it completely changed our workflow on all projects from that time forward).

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    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet ...
  5. Re:what about wiki? by revscat · · Score: 4, Informative

    While Wiki is designed for collaboration, it doesn't allow simulatenous changes that are immediately visible to all collaborators. If you and I were working on a document in SubEthaEdit you would see any changes I make as I make them, and I yours.

    All that and syntax highlighting, too. It's basically the difference between a text editor you run yourself vs. typing a message into Slashdot.