Mozilla bespin

Mozilla Bespin is an experimental development of Mozilla Labs, which has already been written on Habré. The next version 0.4.4 was released, which added the ability to work together on the code. The experimental nature of this thing, I remind you, is that it is made using HTML 5 and “lives” completely in the browser. At leisure, I decided to try out this thing together with my friend (what is the use of trying to work together on a joint development tool for one :)).

Brief introduction

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Having passed the simple registration process, I saw this (this and the following pictures are clickable):



This, in fact, is the editor himself. In addition, Bespin still has a file manager, which displays all the projects and files of these projects, and a completely wonderful console with a decent set of commands and autodetection. It is, of course, still damp: not all the promised commands are supported. However, the idea itself is interesting and I (like my friend) really liked it.



A complete list of commands (and generally quite a lot of useful information) can be found here .

Teamwork

Actually, for the sake of which everything was started. In general, this is my first experience of using such tools (not counting Google Docs - but I never used them for this purpose). Of course, I am aware of the fact that there are all sorts of services for co-editing source texts, but as far as I know, Bespin is unique in its own way.

Collaboration is currently disabled by default for security reasons. However, you can enable it “at your own risk” with the set collaborate on command or through the editor interface. Then you can add this% username% to the list of users with whom you can work together with the follow %username% command and the share add %projectname% %username% command to add the user rights to work with the project. Then you can attend to work.

The editor while editing displays the position of the cursor of each user. At the same time, despite the status of the beta, everything runs very well: the cursor moves smoothly, text updates appear almost without delay where necessary. There was only one problem: for some reason, Bespin did not immediately edit the file, duplicated the tab and the possibility of editing was magically appeared.



By the way, this and another glitch explains that there are so many cursors on the screen (although there were two of us): Bespin incorrectly processed the output from the editor and believed that the user is still editing the file. Moreover, if the user immediately came from the next tab (or just updated the page), then he appeared again. So we became a lot :).

Conclusion

From Bespina, you can get a very interesting product for collaboration, you need projects (for work alone there is no point in it, I think so). Especially for those who work with the web, they can already start using Bespin, since there are unnecessary syntax highlighting (html, css, js), the ability to run js in the console. In addition, thanks to the svn-client, the transition will not be painful - you can continue out of habit to work in the repository.