Ben's Blog World: How to collaborate on a Ruby file (or any other code) in real-time

Sunday, July 25, 2010

How to collaborate on a Ruby file (or any other code) in real-time

Filed under: Developer, Utilities, Productivity

The other day I asked about real-time collaborative Ruby editing. I mean, I found Amy Editor, but it just wasn't good enough. It was too slow and wonky, and didn't work well.

Well, I still needed a tool for coding collaboratively over the net, so I kept hunting and searching. And what do you know - it turns out Notepad++ has a plug-in that does exactly what I need.

Notepad++ is an awesome text editor in itself, and it's extremely versatile. It's one of the many editors I went through before finally settling down with Komodo Edit (for now, at least). It has themes, syntax highlighting for numerous languages, macros, endless configuration options, and, of course, plug-ins.

The plug-in that helped us out is called NppDocShare, and it comes completely devoid of any documentation whatsoever. What I did to make it work:

Put it in Notepad++ plugins folder.
Ran Notepad++, clicked Plugins > NppDocShare > Show Dialog.
Configured my router to forward any traffic it gets on a certain port (I'm not telling which) to port 20081 on my own computer.
Clicked Serve on the NppDocShare dialog.
Got a Windows Firewall warning, and allowed NppDocShare to accept connections.
Gave my IP address to my friend, who connected, and we could then cobble some Ruby together very smoothly and quickly.

The pros:

It's fast. Way faster than any Web-based editor.
You get to enjoy the full power of Notepad++.
Each participant gets their own color.

The cons:

Requires a bit of knowledge to set up.
Absolutely undocumented (what you've just read is probably the most extensive documentation that currently exists for NppDocShare).
When you switch to a different tab, you lose the syntax highlighting! This is a really annoying bug, which I hope will get fixed.

All in all, I'm very happy with this solution, and it worked. Maybe next time I will check out Gobby, which is supposed to be even better for collaborative editing (but lacks the power of Notepad++); if I do, I'll be sure to let you know how that worked out.