SubEthaEditToday i want to talk about one of those programs which make work just a little easier and even fun. SubEthaEdit is a texteditor for Mac OS X. Its Freeware for non-commercial users, otherwise it would have been out of my focus already. It features a lot of cool functionality, but truth be told, you can do most of that with vim too. Or other editors like TextMate. But there is a feature which makes SubEthaEdit stand out of the crowd, which is its Bonjour-powered, collaborative editing feature. Unfortunately i havent been able to test it for a year up until now when Flo got his powerbook and when started playing around with the program on this years Chaos Communication Congress.

Right now we have the program running over an ssh tunnel (two to be more precise), since were not in the same local network nor have a vpn set up (yet!). Even over the internet, with stuff like Skype running in the background (hey, were talking about real collaboration here, right), SubEthaEdit performs amazingly fast and makes working on a document with many users fun. Maybe i should point out that of course every user has his own cursor, otherwise you might just start a screen with vim instead and let people attach to it ;).

It has a lot of cool features which i dont want to go into detail here. I think its better this way, because the Mac OS users can check it out themselves, and the rest doesnt get too jealous ;). Click the thumbnail for a bigger picture of what SubEthaEdit looks like.

Oh, i almost forgot, any program who uses such a cool name (which also actually describes pretty well what its doing) automatically reserves a special spot in every fellow hitchhikers app folder ;)