8.8 Collaborative Editing with SubEthaEdit

One of the challenges in working in a group is maintaining version control on shared documents. SubEthaEdit (created by a group of three computer science students known as "The Coding Monkeys ") redefined the meaning of collaborative working. Using SubEthaEdit, multiple users can edit a single document at the same time. SubEthaEdit uses Rendezvous to discover other users who can join in and collaborate.

You can download SubEthaEdit from http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/.

1. Launch SubEthaEdit.

2. You can start editing or writing your document in the text editing area Click on the Share button (see Figure 8-15) to share your document with other Rendezvous users.

Figure 8-15. Sharing a document

3. SubEthaEdit will reveal the access control list, showing the people who are currently editing the document (see Figure 8-16).

Figure 8-16. Viewing the access control list

4. Other users who want to join in need to run SubEthaEdit as well. To see a list of shared documents, click on the Rendezvous button (see Figure 8-17). Here, you can see that Wei Meng Lee is editing a document entitled Untitled.txt .

Figure 8-17. Viewing the list of users via Rendezvous

5. Double-click on the document that you want to edit, and your name will appear in the access control list of the document master (see Figure 8-18). The document owner can then simply select your username and click on the check (to allow access) or cross icon (to deny access).

Figure 8-18. Granting (or denying ) permissions to a user using the access control list

6. By default, text that every user types is highlighted with a pink background. To choose your own color , go to SubEthaEdit Preferences. You can now distinguish who typed what using the different background colors (see Figure 8-19).

Figure 8-19. Multiple users editing a document