real-time collaborative text editing for pair programming

[skyfaller]

Hi folks, has anyone thought about using Helix for real-time collaborative text editing, e.g. for pair programming? I recognize that the conventional advice for terminal-based text editors is to just stick it in tmux, but I was wondering if it would be possible/desirable to design a different workflow, perhaps without the external dependency of tmux.

One feature that stands out to me is that Helix supports multiple cursors. This seems like a crucial feature for pair programming, so perhaps we're already partway there?

UPDATE: Ethersync is a project to enable collaborative editing in an editor-agnostic way, using peer-to-peer networking so you don't need to install a server: https://github.com/ethersync/ethersync

To create a plugin for it, you can build off of an LSP plugin: https://ethersync.github.io/ethersync/editor-plugin-dev-guide.html

helix has LSP built-in, and has no plugin system. Does that mean it would be most appropriate to build ethersync support into helix itself?

[Omnikar]

Probably relevant: #312

[mbrea-c]

My 2 cents: this would be a killer feature IMO. While not useful 100% of the time, there are many tasks in programming that are very easily parallelizable: writing unit tests, certain kinds of refactoring, any kind of repetitive boilerplate, etc. A friend and I did some hacking sessions using the Zed editor on some project we were working on and we were able to get things done much more smoothly than with traditional "one person codes and the second watches" style of pair programming. Plus, it was more fun, for what that's worth.

By sharing a tmux session all participants are still sharing the same cursor, so I consider it to be closer to traditional pair programming than real collaborative editing.

[Guekka]

This might be relevant: Open Collaboration Tools

[schell]

This would definitely be nice!

[danriedl]

#13226