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Writing Fiction Using SubEthaEdit
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.
"national teaching award from Radio Shack" What an honor to win such a thing. What's next? Best movie award from /. ?
...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.
Man, the best fiction I've ever produced is some of the project plans created using SubEtha.
The greatest lasagne recipe I ever wrote was crafted in MS Word 6.0.
OK, OK, Courier 12 point, if you must know.
An excellent example can be found here.
The formula is as follows.
1.) Write article based entirely on misrepresented sensational claims about the end of the world.
2.) Get slashdotted
3.) Sell more ads for website based on high traffic volumes (use only averages when representing numbers to ad buying customers.)
4.) Profit!
Its a shame there's not a windows/*nix version, or a similar thing using AIM or MSN Messenger. Do similar tools exist and I've never seen them maybe? I'd like to do some online collaborations.
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.
Each new post describing a choice. How geeky...
/me ill-it-errr-it [enter]
You come up to the entrance to a crumbling dungeon, where the fabled ruby of souls resides. Rummaging around in your pockets, you fish out your trusty dagger. Well...dagger..ish. Ok, it's a butter knife. hopefully you can find something better. Looking up at the cavernesque mouth of the dungeon, a chill runs down your spine, and a small spider crawls up your leg. Ick! you quickly swat it, then ponder the situation at hand. a set of vines snakes all over the sides of the tower that overlooks the dungeon courtyard. you could probably get a good view from there. then again, it looks reaaaaaly high up, and you've been known to get dizzy on a stepladder. maybe it's best to just not know what's ahead...
Will you:
A: try to climb up to the tower?
B: press on into the dungeon?
C: Go home and have tea?
B: press on into the dungeon.
Being scared of heights, you choose to press on into the dank dungeon, smelling the foul nastiness that is this thing. You find a copper sword on the ground, bending it as you smash it dirt wall of the dungeon. "Eh, my knife is better than this piece of pooh." You open a nearby door, and watch a dog eating some gecko thing on the floor. You hear a message echoing throughout the dungeon: "Dog has killed a gecko." Upon approaching the dog, you notice some writing on the ground.
"I$ #ou c$n r!@ t#i@ &u% m$*t be sm@r$."
Do you:
A: north [enter]
B: write with knife [enter]
C:
A: Enter the area
You suddenly realize that you are in the middle of a NetHack game, and that the little dog is at least 5 times stronger than you. Frantically searching your pockets, you find something squishy. Aha! tripe, your favorite midnight snack. with a mighty heave, you lob the ball of smelly meat at the dog, which greedily devours it, then looks at you lovingly. Aww, how sweet, you made a friend. Now that you have a chance to search the room, which reveals a well-hidden, and very sturdy looking door.
Will you:
A: Open the door carefully?
B: Kick the door down?
C: Kick the dog?
C: Kick the dog
With a mighty hoof you poot the dog in the side of it's belly. For a moment it does nothing, before letting out a strange welp noise, then making a bolt for the door. It smashes it down, whining as it goes. You look on through the now defunct doorway to see a band of Half-Clay Superorc beyond, flattened by your pooch's charge. In the distance you can hear the mutt whining, surely far into the dungeon and out of audible reach. Walking into the corridor, you notice three exits. Which will you take?
A: North
B: South
C: Dennis
etc...
like?
and BTW.. SubEtha has been around for years.. prior to the name change 3 years ago they were known as HydraEdit.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
My internal English parser barfed on this sentence. WTF is the parent talking about???
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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?
Its a shame there's not a windows/*nix version, or a similar thing using AIM or MSN Messenger. Do similar tools exist and I've never seen them maybe? I'd like to do some online collaborations.
Well, there's NetMeeting, which comes with Win2K and XP (and as an install on earlier versions). Text, audio/video conf, whiteboard, app sharing. Not the greatest but it's already installed and it's free.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
isn't wiki designed for this collaberation? unlike sub ertha edit, it is not fixed to an operating system, just a web browser, allowing everyone to participate.
Lightweights! Real men use vi with LaTeX to write their lasagna recipes. Donald Knuth would be so proud.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
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).
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
What I want to know is when a vi-style interface would be put into SubEthaEdit. (I know the FAQ says vi/etc. can't do this, but I don't see what's wrong with putting a vi-interface on SubEthaEdit then). I'd register SubEthaEdit once implemented!
Surely I can't be the only one with source code littered with ":q" and other stuck vi-isms until we realize the editor doesn't support them...
Mac users don't want their writing tainted by non-Mac users. And I agree.
Well, I asked the coding monkeys for a minor fix back with 1.0, and it's still broken. And rather than opening the source like they said they were considering, SubEthaEdit now costs $35 for commercial use, whereas TextWrangler is just plain free.
Don't get me wrong; I am looking for an alernative, too. But SubEthaEdit isn't it.
It's closed-source, Windows/Linux x86 only, is a terrible editor, the UI is horrible and it's generally a pain to use in comparison to subetha which Just Works, but it's a lot better than nothing.
...how is it better than nothing? If the tool gets in the way, aren't you better off ditching the tool?
That doesn't add up to me. If it doesn't run on a Mac, is a bad program with a bad user interface and is a pain to use
Just "Hydra". I still rename each update of SubEthaEdit (HYDRA!!!) after I download it.
We started using it to work on playwriitng. One child does one person's dialog, another takes another character's dialog, while another will do descriptions, and another will edit and correct.
What makes it work is rendezvous. The kids don't need to know ip addresses or hostnames - only usernames. We can setup several groups at once without making it into a major project.
Aside from the obvious benefits, it creates a transparent opportunity for the kids learn about group dynamics and working together in a way not many classroom activities do. Because the program works so simply, the kids focus on the work without thinking about the process of making it work together. There are other ways of accomplishing this, but nothing that's anywhere as simple as Subethaedit. I'm glad to see people are starting to see the usefulness of this approach. I'm amazed it's taken so long.