[Tfug] Collaborative editing environments?

[Claude Rubinson]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 01:09:51PM -0700, Robert Hunter wrote:
> Found this package for emacs.  I'm curious if it works with Google Docs.
> 
> http://emacspeak.blogspot.com/2007/03/emacs-client-for-google-services.html

Yes, there's a package, gdocs.el, that permits you to pull and push to
Google Docs.  I played with it a bit and while it works, it's kind of
a "worst of both worlds" solution.  You need to know the document id
that Google uses, which is a bit of a pain.  When pulling, it converts
the document to HTML or plain text, which is what you'd want if you're
going to be editing in Emacs but doesn't help me with the
collaboration aspect.  When pushing, it simply clobbers the existing
file.  It shouldn't be too difficult to write a function that, before
pushing, pulls the existing doc from Google for a diff against your
Emacs buffer but you'll still have a race condition (I didn't
investigate whether Google's API allows for locking).

So it works but doesn't really solve any of the problems that I'm
facing.

C.