Mine the Harvest

I’ve been playing around with some collaborative coding tools recently: Etherpad, c9.io, infinoted / Gobby which is pretty cool with the Gedit plugin, etc. These, especially c9.io with it’s GitHub and Heroku integration, are very cool tools.

However, with the exception of the Gedit Collaboration plugin, many collaborative coding sites expect you to use a web editor. While c9.io’s editor is okay, nothing beats editor like vim, kate, etc.

Floobits is a collaborative editing site, but they are creating plugins for editors. One is available for Sublime Text, and one for Vim is in progress. Floobits lets you create public or private “rooms”, import code from github, and edit the content with a native editor. Using this with Sublime Text is pretty cool. If you need to share code or work with someone who is not set up with an editor and Floobits plugin, no problem – they can fall back to using the Floobits web editor. In minutes you an be coding together.

All the above lead me to check out Sublime Text 2, and I have to say – wow. I’m a long time Vim user, and while I love Vim (especially as my sys admin workhorse editor) for long coding stints, Sublime is looking amazingly good. Just check out the slideshow. But when you match Sublime up with git and floobits plugins, it gets even better.

Sublime has some other brilliant features. The ctrl-p function to search all files, and bring them automatically into focus – and then zero in on the function your looking for instantly is pretty much gold. See the screenshots of this in action, as well as other general tips here. I also really like the preview panel for navigating. And it’s fast – really fast.

Though licensed, it’s extremely forgiving. Download for Linux, Windows and OSX and it is fully functional, no expiration. You don’t need a key, or an account, etc. Download and use. If you like it you can purchase a license for $70.

If you want to test drive Sublime Text and Floobits see my guide, which has some tips as the Package Control installer has a bug that requires manually installing Floobits – which is trivial. And or course see Floobits plugin page.