Gobby, collaborative editing for Gnome
Posted by Damien Pollet Tue, 27 Sep 2005 19:40:01 GMT
As seen on the Tao of Mac, Gnome now has his collaborative editor: Gobby! I will definetely try this as soon as I have some neuron load to dedicate to it.
Of course, Mac users have had this for some years now, thanks to SubEthaEdit. The problem is, when you’re a Mac guy with Linux friends, the mac-only approach of SubEthaEdit is of limited use. Granted, the proportion of mac users has never been so high among my friends, but still.
Despite being closed-source, SubEthaEdit uses BEEP, a standard protocol, and I thought the particular use it makes of BEEP was publicly documented somewhere, but I can’t find it… anyway it would be very cool if Gobby had a way to talk to SubEthaEdit.
They didn’t release any protocol specs. BEEP is an open communication protocol, that’s true, but it doesn’t implement anything else than a session where many users can participate in. All the things on top could be even transmitted binary. However I never tried to reverse engineer their protocol, I just tried to get them to release some specs.
net6 and obby are open libraries after all, so it’s more a matter of using them.
Bah… Sad but true, I kinda expected that.
Locking SubEthaEdit into mac-only uses is just stupid: the net result is I have no use for that editor since I have no one to use it with, and Emacs is still a superior editor for most of my documents.