Collaborative Text Editor

[Nick Vargish]

jjl at pobox.com (John J. Lee) writes:

> Cool!  I've wondered about this in the past.  Not sure how useful it
> would turn out to be, but would be fun to find out.

See SubEthaEdit (Mac OS X only, unfortunately) for a very nice
implementation of this idea.

> I wonder if client-server is the way to go here.  On the surface, P2P
> seems more natural fit.

I think client-server is the way to go, it reduces complexity when you
have more than two people collaborating at once. The person who
initiates the edit session has the cannonical version of the file.

> - At any time, exactly one person has control.

SubEthaEdit allows all participants to write at the same time. Text
from each participant is marked with a highlight color specific to
that contributor.

Token-passing is an interesting idea, but it could be frustrating for
people who do not get the token (which could happen for any number of
reasons, deserved or undeserved).

Nick
 
-- 
#  sigmask  ||  0.2  ||  20030107  ||  public domain  ||  feed this to a python
print reduce(lambda x,y:x+chr(ord(y)-1),' Ojdl!Wbshjti!=obwAcboefstobudi/psh?')