Gobby For Linux

Nowadays, there are a ton of very capable and, frankly, quite amazing collaboration tools. Thus, editing a document by two or more users is not something groundbreaking by today's standards. However, what if you don't want to deal with everything modern collaboration platforms provide?

One answer might come in the form of Gobby, a free, open-source, and cross-platform collaborative text editor. Its job is to provide multiple users with the same tools for editing the same document together over the Internet in real-time.

We'll be the first to say that, indeed, Gobby won't impress anyone with its looks. What really makes Gobby special is its feature set, which is surprising, to say the least.

For starters, it has real-time, lock-free collaborative text editing. It also boasts an integrated group chat (to make the whole process a lot smoother, even though, we will say that a voice feature would have been even better), and has pretty advanced text editing capabilities including syntax highlighting (using GtkSourceView).

The app is capable of displaying text highlights written by different users with different colors, as well as the cursors and selections of remote participants. It also has full Unicode support, Zeroconf support (only on Linux), encrypted data transfer, password-protected sessions (optional, but handy), neat access control with ACL (Access Control Lists), and a highly configurable dedicated server.

If everything sounds good up until now, let's look at how you can get started with this app. The first thing that needs to be pointed out is that the two or more computers that plan to collaborate need to be connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

By default, Gobby usually lists the other computers running Gobby automatically (at least on Linux). You can also press CTRL+T or simply select the "Connect to Server" option in the menu, and manually create a new connection.

Gobby is a very nice collaborative editor for the masses. It's free, it packs a hefty amount of useful features, it comes with support for a plethora of documents (and has syntax highlighting for multiple types of text), and it even has a multi-user chat.

The only real downsides of the app are that it doesn't have a voice feature (which would have made the whole collaboration process a bit smoother) and that it's not exactly a good-looking app (at least not by modern standards).