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A Web App For Real-Time Collaborative Writing

Posted by kdawson on from the write-on dept.

adamengst writes in with good news for anyone who needs to collaborate remotely on a writing or editing project — coding too. It's especially good news for those using Windows and Linux. Mac users have had SubEthaEdit for a few years now. With EtherPad, two or more people can edit a document and see all the edits simultaneously. EtherPad's main differences from SubEthaEdit: it's a Web application that de facto supports many platforms without the need for a central Mac OS X host; and it's free. Here is a comparison of EtherPad and SubEthaEdit.

9 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. There's also the Eclipse Communication Framework by toby · · Score: 4, Informative

    ECF home, articles at IBM DeveloperWorks, InfoQ.

    From the latter: ECF is...

    • Real-time communication and collaboration features for teams using Eclipse such as peer-to-peer file sharing, remote opening of Eclipse views, screen capture sharing, and real-time shared editing.
    • A set of communications APIs and frameworks built upon existing protocols (like Google Talk, XMPP, SSH, HTTP/HTTPS, Rendevous, IRC, and others) for developers to add communications and messaging to their own Equinox-based plugins, or customize and extend the ECF applications.
    --
    you had me at #!
  2. Re:Looks great! by Ed+Avis · · Score: 2, Informative

    Have you tried using a version control system such as Subversion or Mercurial? You don't all see the same screen in real time, but it automatically coordinates changes that need to be merged in.

    --
    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
  3. Re:Mmm... by Skinkie · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/ seems very cross-platform to me too. Who needs ctrl-z anyway if not using bash?

    --
    Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
  4. screen -x by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I use `screen -x` for collaborating on anything.
    And, to add to this flamebait, I use a good editor (i.e. vi or vim).

  5. Gobby by kwalker · · Score: 4, Informative

    Linux and Windows users (And I think there's an OS X port too) can use Gobby, which is like SubEthaEdit, but free, written in GTK+, includes a free server for collaboration over the net, and zeroconf support for finding users on the local network. Since it's based on GTK+, it has things like syntax highlighting, spellcheck, etc. already available. It should also be in most popular distros' repos already.

    --
    ... And so it comes to this.
  6. Re:Looks great! by Cowmonaut · · Score: 2, Informative

    GoogleDocs....

  7. Re:Drawing version? by tepples · · Score: 2, Informative

    Does anybody know of a collaborative drawing tool in the same vein?

    You could start your research at Wikipedia: Oekaki and Paint chat

  8. Re:Google Docs, Abiword Collaboration,IRC, SVN etc by x102output · · Score: 2, Informative

    Na, Google Docs does not do this. This is REAL-TIME collaboration, updating on the screen as you type.

  9. CollabEdit by Maexxus · · Score: 4, Informative

    This has been done before, http://collabedit.com/ :)