My friend and I usually don't have time to meet up in person to do some real pair programming. Since we want to program together anyway, we turned to the world of collaborative software editing.
Sadly, most of the solutions we have tried are either lackluster or don't work at all. Cloud9 (fusion of Mozilla Skywriter, ACE) is tossing errors like there's no tomorrow and makes developing a project impossible.
Notepad++'s plugin seems to be broken.
CollabEdit allows only for one file at the time. Granted, you can open multiple windows, but that makes editing a bunch of files really, really awkward and clumsy.
Is there any online or offline software to enable sane collaborative editing? We tried Skyping with a shared screen, and while it's truer to pair-programming than two people coding at once, we don't want to be limited that way.
Best Answer
It looks like you misunderstood the concept of pair programming. It is not about two people editing one file. I guess you could get two monitors, but there is only one keyboard and one mouse.
The pair programming is about two heads thinking in two different tracks. While one write code, the other looks and see if there are major errors (like a code review on steroids), plus he thinks on what to do next.
Having said that, you can take a look into this list and see if you find something that suits your need. The one that I use is gobby.