Re: What is the most useful potential feature which Emacs lacks?

[Yuri Khan]

On Mon, 1 Jun 2020 at 10:54, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
>   > What about collaborative editing?  That is, multiple people
>   > simultaneously editing a document over the internet.
>
> It would be good to do that in a truly usable way.
>
> Emacs has had the feature of running multiple terminals at once for
> over 20 years, but there are bad problems in it.  To do it right, to
> has to have a thread for each terminal, and they have to be able to
> get in and out of the minibuffer separately.

More importantly, a single Emacs will force identical configuration on
all collaborating users. And, instead of collaborating, they will
curse and bicker over every small convenience each of them has become
used to.

> The other way to do this is to have separate Emacs processes that
> communicate with each other.  We would need to use modification hooks
> to take note of changes and transmit them to the other Emacses.
>
> Or perhaps one Emacs could be the "server", and the others act as clients,
> maintaining mirrors of the document.

However, it then follows that each instance is going to have its own
supporting tools. So, a power user who has an elaborate setup with
LSP, flycheck, whatever, will not be able to share the advantages of
his setup with a newbie.


Also, most collaboration editing tools in use today let users work on
a single document but not necessarily on multiple files in a project.
E.g. in a pair programming scenario, it would be nice if one could say
“now let’s go to that other file” and the other would automatically
follow. Preferably in a way that avoids the usual post-teleportation
feeling of disorientation.