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by oblique63 4336 days ago
Have been using this to pair-program on a project recently. It's probably the best collaborative coding solution out there at the moment, but it still has some issues. Most notably, it inexplicably deleted an entire directory from our project between coding sessions at one point, causing us to delete and recreate our 'workspace' -- luckily it doesn't affect the source project of the collaborator that shared it, but still caused us to spend about an hour trying to figure out how to 'refresh' our projects. Another minor quibble is that you can't tell what file anybody is currently viewing/editing, which can cause some confusion when talking in a hangout call.

But overall it's pretty effective for those times when you just need to look at code with someone remotely.

2 comments

I apologize for the bugs and confusing UI. We recently made a change where files that are ignored by git are no longer shared in Floobits.

Have you tried the summon command? It will cause everyone else in the workspace to jump to your file/cursor.

Yeah, using 'summon' works, it just kind of slips our minds that it exists when we're thinking/talking about the code, but that's likely just a familiarity issue. Mostly it's just the use-case of being able to casually see what a teammate is working on at a glance instead of asking distracting questions, but it's not a huge deal.

Thanks for the support! I've been working on a collaborative editing solution of my own for a while (though not for code), and can definitely appreciate the work that goes in to such a thing.

I have bound "summon" to a keyboard shortcut:"cntrl+option+cmd+s". I have a bunch of floobits actions bound to a keyboard short cuts, like Join project's workspace, leave workspace etc.

As for deleting your data, Floobits only ever deletes anything when someone overwrites the workspace from somewhere else. If you run into issues like this please contact us so we can look at the problem and fix it so it doesn't happen to you again and so others also don't run into this problem.

FWIW you may have been able to restore the deleted folder using Local History.