Big IDEA

Collaborative editing with Gobby

25 October 2005

Why mess with Word’s “track changes” or schedule a meeting when you might be able to accomplish your goals using a synchronous, multiuser text editor? What we’re talking about is the ability to have multiple people edit the same document at the same time. There are now a few tools that allow this.

The cool thing about Gobby is that it’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It’s pretty simple to use–you just launch it and decide if you’re hosting or joining a session. When you host a session, a port on your computer has to be open to connections from other computers. You can specify a session password if you want. You then have to tell the people you’re working with your ip address so they can connect. Start editing!

People connect to your computer by launching Gobby and telling it to join a session. They’ll type in the ip address you’ve given them and a password (if you assigned one) and then they’ll join your session.

Each user can have a unique color to make seeing who’s typing what more obvious. Right now the color coding uses background color, which is a little distracting; I’d like to see it use font color instead.

Another nice feature is syntax highlighting. If it doesn’t automatically pick the correct language, you can go to View > Syntax and choose a language (I had to do this for a bash script).

Gobby has a chat window built right in, which is pretty handy; it saves me from having to manage both IM and Gobby. Color-coded chat with smileys would be cool.

All in all I like Gobby and it can only get better. Did I mention it’s free software (GPL)?

If you don’t want to download an application to use, you can try online synchronous editing. SynchroEdit is in the alpha stage, but it seems to work pretty well. It’s free software you can run on your own server if you want. JotSpot Live offers a more polished interface. The free version limits you to five pages per month, $5 per month will get you 15 pages per month, and $20 per month will get you unlimited pages. I don’t know of any other web-based simultaneous multiuser editors, but I’m sure more are on the way.

I’m generally not interested in collaboration solutions that work on only one platform, but Mac-only users can check out SubEthaEdit.