Jar of Wonder

Collaborative text editing (two or more people working on the same document at the same time) is something that I find myself wishing I could use all of the time in situations where lots of people are sitting together trying to hammer something out. On Mac OS X, there is an excellent program called SubEthaEdit which does this perfectly. It is a joy to use, but unfortunately only works on Mac. Sadly, one sometimes has to work with non-Mac users, so I’ve been searching for a while for a similar program that works across platforms. I’ve finally found one and tested it out today: Gobby.

Gobby is written with the GTK+ and the GTKmm bindings, which means Windows users have to install these first, but they’ve made it pretty easy by providing a link to a nice package which installs both automatically.

Short guide for my Windows-Using friends:

1. Download the GTKmm package here
2. Run the downloaded installer. It will ask you if you’d like to also install GTK+-2.8.x, say yes
3. Download Gobby here
4. Run the downloaded Gobby installer
5. Open Gobby