Hunter, like most other schools has gone remote. I taught my first two online classes on Thursday. Currently, I'm using Zoom for synchronous stuff and a mailing list and slack for async.

There are still some missing pieces. When we're all together, it's easy to look at a student's work and talk them through issues. It's also easy to get students to work together, at least to a point. With everyone locked up in their own homes, real time collaboration is harder. Sure, we can use tools like GitHub issues and pull requests for async code commentary but what about live help and pairing? If we want to use an online environment, repl.it - a platform I very much like fits the bill. On the other hand, what do you use if you want to work collaboratively in real time using a local editor.

That's where Floobits comes in. Floobits is a platform that provides for collaborative live editing. It works with Emacs, Neovim, Sublime Text, Atom, and IntelliJ (and maybe all the Jetbrains IDEs). They support a free tier which only has public workspaces but that's fine, as far as I'm concerned, for educational purposes.

Check out the video to see how I set it up: