Writing Fiction Using SubEthaEdit

Phil Shapiro writes "The recent blizzard on the East Coast makes for some great collaborative creativity opportunities of various sorts, including group fiction writing using SubEthaEdit. Did you know you can write fiction about collaborative fiction writing using collaborative fiction writing tools? We didn't either." Man, the best fiction I've ever produced is some of the project plans created using SubEtha.

For those who don't know...

[diamondsw]

...this [codingmonkeys.de] is SubEthaEdit. It's a rendezvous and network-aware text editor designed for collaborative coding that seems to be finding more use. Meanwhile, it's also just a damn nice text editor for general use, and is free (yes, I know that TextWrangler [barebones.com] is also free now).

This only solves the technical problem.

[iJames]

The real problem with collaborative fiction is finding collaborators who aren't idiots, and then getting good work out of it. The "article" linked was stilted and the humor was inane.

Sure, there are projects suited to live collaboration. Screenplays, songs, even blog fiction [invisiblejames.com] (self plug). But prose narrative is one of the least likely. Name one good novel that was written by committee.

Re:Sorry

[Teppy]

Collaborative text editors were a hot research topic about 8-10 years ago, and it turns out to be quite hard to get them right.

The only mostly-finished one I could find that runs on Windows (and Linux!) is MoonEdit [sphere.pl]. Anyone want to put a server up and try it?

Re:For those who don't know...

[Ford Prefect]

Meanwhile, it's also just a damn nice text editor for general use, and is free

You do have to pay for a commercial use licence - only saying this because I'm one of those people who has registered!

It's a great text editor just by itself, but since nobody I work with has a Mac it's a little annoying that my copy stays offline. Still, it was well worth the registration fee anyway, and supporting other programmers financially gives one that warm-and-fuzzy feeling you only get with registering non-nagging shareware. ;-)

Re:For those who don't know...

[the_2nd_coming]

it is a GREAT Programming editor... is supports tons of languages out of the box and you can get more Modes from the website plus write your own and submit them.

IT JUST WORKS™

[jdwest]

On a whim, I installed SubEthaEdit for a recent collaborative project for use on a P'book and a friend's iBook. Both of us were editing (wirelessly) the same document within five minutes -- w/o reading a line from TFM . Nothing scientific to back it up, but we agreed that it saved us a good amount of total project time (and it completely changed our workflow on all projects from that time forward).

Re:TextWrangler--too little, too late

[Trillan]

Well, I asked the coding monkeys for a minor fix back with 1.0, and it's still broken. And rather than opening the source like they said they were considering, SubEthaEdit now costs $35 for commercial use, whereas TextWrangler is just plain free.

Don't get me wrong; I am looking for an alernative, too. But SubEthaEdit isn't it.

Re:Mac OSX only...

[TylerL82]

Just "Hydra". I still rename each update of SubEthaEdit (HYDRA!!!) after I download it.

Re:what about wiki?

[revscat]

While Wiki is designed for collaboration, it doesn't allow simulatenous changes that are immediately visible to all collaborators. If you and I were working on a document in SubEthaEdit you would see any changes I make as I make them, and I yours.

All that and syntax highlighting, too. It's basically the difference between a text editor you run yourself vs. typing a message into Slashdot.

Re:For those who don't know...

[rtm1]

SubEthaEdit is a Cocoa application, which means porting it for Windows / Linux would require nearly a total re-write depending on how much of it is written in Objective-C

Because it has to be said, there is always GNUstep [gnustep.org] when you need to port a Cocoa app to Windows or *nix. I have read mixed reviews, but if you stick to the core Openstep API then you should be okay porting your Cocoa app to GNUstep. As far as Obj-C goes, gcc does compile it, so it isn't the language that's the stumbling block.

All of that said, the codingmonkeys have commented in the past that their use of Apple only frameworks (rendezvous, addressbook, etc), would make a port to gnustep really difficult, and that they make pretty heavy use of the newer Apple Cocoa extensions (CoreFoundation) that aren't in Openstep or GNUstep. So doing a Windows / *nix port is hard, but not because of Obj-C or Cocoa in general, but because SubEtha uses several of the newer OS X APIs that aren't in Openstep. At least that is my understanding of it.

Re:For those who don't know...

[chickens]

I've been looking for a few months now for a cross-platform alternative to SubEthaEdit. There exists a plugin for jEdit [jedit.org], but that's implemented on top of IRC and is a bit of work to set up

Just recently discovered MoonEdit [sphere.pl] which is a little more like what I need. The collaboration works very well, but it's a bit light on other features..

A port of SubEthaEdit would be so nice...*dreams*

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