You can always share emacs (or vim) under screen, tmux or that other thing Ubuntu uses on a throwaway EC2 instance.

I've been doing pair programming sessions on a Google Hangout sharing screens and I'm considering giving this setup another try.

Can you explain this in a little more detail, or have a blog post about it? I've been thinking about doing something similar (`screen` for shared coding environment, with some other thing -- skype, say-- for video chat). I'd be very interested to know details about such a set up someone else has used, and any caveats or issues (for instance, screen didn't seem to export the environment faithfully, in my limited experience).

I have done remote pair programming with screen for a long time. Tmux might be more modern, but I have never tried it.

Caveat with using screen: You must suid root the screen binary, which is not very cool.

Put the following in .screenrc:

  multiuser on
  acladd <other username>

Then, start a screen, and the other user can join it using:

  screen -x <your username>/

The slash at the end is important.

I like to add some stuff to the screenrc setting up a status bar at the bottom showing all the windows and which users are viewing which window, but I'd have to dig out my old screenrc to remember how.

Skype for audio chat, or some other audio chat (even just a phone call which is what we did a lot back in the day) is essential. Video is less important and hogs a lot of bandwidth.

Good luck, I really hope collaborative remote programming becomes more popular!

I have used GNU Screen + Skype in the past as well and it worked out quite well.

"I like to add some stuff to the screenrc setting up a status bar at the bottom showing all the windows and which users are viewing which window, but I'd have to dig out my old screenrc to remember how." Or you could use Byobu(https://launchpad.net/byobu) which is an enhancement of GNU Screen and comes with a lot of good features.

There's a demo video at http://pair.io that explains it pretty well (along with some GitHub setup magic)

We decided to have a little fun with the open sourcing and play with some cool new open source tech for a change :).

I settled on vert.x (the server container that requires Java 7) because it seemed to have a lot of affordances out of the box for client-server transport, and it's architecture made it easy to port/re-build pieces of our server stack.

But yeah, Java7 on Mac is a pita :(.

Isn't vert.x a little bit "young" for Google to use?

why sad?

... because this is what happens when I use Java-based tools that are associated with Google (i.e. Eclipse+ADT): http://i46.tinypic.com/300tyc9.png

If you're complaining about the memory usage, lower the max heap size with the arguments: -Xms512m -Xmx512m. If it's CPU usage: turn off some of those addons. You can't say Java 7 is the root cause of the CPU usage and not Eclipse.

It's meant to run on a server i think, reducing memory so it's laptop friendly probably was not a driving feature

Plus Java feels like it has a target painted on its back by malware authors these days.