After reading luis' post I couldn't resist taking a look at the 'competition' and I tried out gobby. I must admit that it is really cool and already works fairly well.

I however can't help but think that reimplementing a full text editor around the functionality is a fair bit of duplicated work and necessarily leads to a lack of polish in many details of a proper text editor (among other things it lacks undo redo, though I am fairly sure that this is due to the difficulty of implementing undo redo in a way compatible with collaborative editing). I really wish to have this kind of functionality done as a gedit plugin. It could reuse gobby's library or even GOCollab if it ever materializes. It would also avoid language wars (gobby is C++) since everybody knows that doing it in python would be a sane choice :)

On the bright side they are using GtkSourceView. By the way, since gobby also run on win32, if its developers or anyone else using gtksourceview on win32 wants to commit the win port upstream and put binary installers on the site, just get in touch with us.

Speaking of python plugins, adding a terminal pane is fourty lines of python (ok, far from a polished terminal, but still...)