If Covid-19 brought something good, it was that there were and are many projects that make remote work so easy and make it as effective as possible. With the new plugin from JetBrains you can from now on also collaborative coding: Anyone with an IntelliJ license can organize ‘Live Programming’ sessions together with others.
Code With Me as a plugin
The plugin is officially developed by JetBrains and is with version 2020.2.x by IntelliJ and others
JetBrains IDEs compatible.
As usual, the plugin can be found in the JetBrains Marketplace. After the installation you will find in the top right Corner of the IDE an icon with which you can allow access.
As soon as you activate the access, a new session is opened and a generated link is automatically added to the Clipboard copied. You can then send this to the person (oder Personen) with whom you would like to want to work together. They can then easily participate in the current session after the host this explicitly allows access again.
Together you advance
Fullsync vs Following
There are two different modes of collaboration, Fullsync and Following. If you choose the Fullsync mode so you take over the input of the “opposite”. The input is therefore synchronized. In Following mode, you can see only the position of the cursor and can follow the inputs. At the same time you have the option of one other position itself what to edit.
What is still missing?
Although the plugin is already very functional and runs ‘out-of-the-box’, a few are still missing Small things or there are a few bugs. It’s not quite intuitive yet, and we miss an even better integrated collaboration.
File transfer between the IDE’s
It would be nice if you could copy a file from computer A to computer B. When creating this post we wanted For example, copy screenshots to our pictures folder, but this is only possible on the computer that is sharing initiated.
Plugin support not guaranteed
After installing the Markdown Plugin from IntelliJ, we were unfortunately no longer able to send Markdown files to open. Only deactivating the plug-in provided a remedy so that we could continue working collaboratively. Plugins seem to cause problems between the clients.
View not synchronized
The views cannot be synchronized due to the use of different plugins or settings in the IDE guaranteed. For example, in our test, line breaks were not displayed correctly at the other partner.
Conclusion
This blog post was written using the ‘Code With Me’ plugin. We had a lot of fun with it and the advantages of the plugin became clear very quickly. We at b-nova attach great importance to communication and transparent work. We find Code With Me really practical and see a lot of potential for even better cooperation in the office and with our customers. The thrust of JetBrains towards integrated and collaborative work is certainly forward-looking and will establish itself in every developer team in the near future.
This text was automatically translated with our golang markdown translator.
