About DocSynch
DocSynch is a collaborative editing system on top of IRC. By transforming single-user editors into multi-user editors, it allows to remotely edit text documents together. Implementations are targeted as extensions to many popular text editors and IDEs. A working version is available for jEdit.
If you have any comments, feature suggestions, bug reports, etc., please mail to aklimets@users.sourceforge.net or subscribe to the docsynch-users mailing list.
Latest News
More news can be found on the news page.
Features
- collaborative editing
- different editing modes (currently only manual lock)
- manual lock mode -- manually request write access
- auto-lock mode -- lock acquired by starting to type
- teacher lock mode -- only the master assigns locks/write access'
- real-time mode -- all can type at the same time
- tracking of changes
- highlighting of changes
- integration into existing editors
- using IRC as network protocol
IRC as basis
DocSynch runs on top of IRC, so you additionally need an IRC client that fits DocSynch. This means that DocSynch acts like an IRC bot, therefore the IRC client must allow such an addition. Normal clients do not fulfil this requirement, thus we must modify existing ones or write our own. Those will be found here as well (currently we only have an implementation for jEdit, where a modified version of the IRC plugin is used). And you will need an IRC Server, you can take any existing one, but also set up your own. The latter is actually better, because you can turn off or at least minder the flooding limits in order to improve DocSynch's performance.
Current Status
There is one implementation for jEdit in late beta status. Important features are still added (real-time editing mode, auto-lock mode, teacher mode, handling of goodbye or failure of the master, color control). After a final release for jEdit has been made, an add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 will be developed (using J#), another java plugin for Eclipse will be developed and later maybe an extension to VIM. Currently I am working on a java-based IRC client widget (called PlugIRC) which shall support Swing, SWT and Windows Forms (via J#).
Author
DocSynch is written and maintained by Alexander Klimetschek. He was a student at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute at the University of Potsdam, has co-founded Mindquarry and lives in Berlin, Germany. Valuable support was made by Lars Trieloff - for more information visit his interesting Software Documentation Blog.
This website is up since 20th January 2004.