I wish we would have the equivalent of the language servers but for collaborative editing. That way you could edit with one user in emacs, one in vscode, one in intellij etc.
I once used something called Floobits[1] that was capable of this. In practice collaborative editing wasn't that much more useful vs screen sharing and the additional constraints of managing Floobits workspaces didn't make it worth it for us.
I did pair programming on XEmacs in the 90's by opening a new frame on a second X server. It worked surprisingly well as long as both people stayed out of the minibuffer.
That looks nice, however for those interested, only the plugins are opensource and usage is not free. The good thing is that it shows what is possible.
i find collaborative editing most useful for online docs, like wiki pages, etc. not having to worry about locking makes a big difference when editing is fast paced
That is such a great idea. The need for a service like overleaf to provide an entire front-end + text editor is just ridiculous when there is already so much existing software out there. Multiple editors with realtime shared data + shared previewing tools totally should be a thing.
