Really cool, Repl.it is the best online bite-sized programming platform I've ever used. The breadth of languages offered is surprising (Brainfuck and Scheme?!), and things I would have thought wouldn't be supported were supported.<p>I say this in spite of an excruciating experience I had a few weeks ago where I led a Python for absolute beginners day-long workshop. I had tried Repl.it before writing the course materials and was mind-blown at how everything just worked, including the filesystem, which I needed for downloading NLTK modules. I decided to design the materials around Repl.it, letting me spare the class the possibly excruciating and definitely not fun experience of downloading and configuring Python and an IDE. Unfortunately, on the day of the workshop, Repl.it just didn't work for half the class, and for most of the rest, it was really, really slow. Hopefully this was just a hiccup.
I wonder what technology Repl.it is using for the multiplayer. VS code has a live coding plugin, is this what is used?<p>Disclosure: I’m the CEO of GitLab and we’re looking at live coding ourselves as well.
This is really cool.<p>Bit of an aside: I used to take notes and share code using SubEthaEdit which pioneered this sort of collaborative editing over a decade ago. While it’s now pretty normal to see students taking collaborative notes in classes using Google Docs (and etherpad before it was acquired by Google to improve the experience in Docs), it was astonishing a decade ago. I recall spontaneously loading it up at an early Rails conference and taking notes with a bunch of strangers (it advertises open docs over the LAN). It was a noteworthy enough experience that one of the collaborators blogged about it. [1]<p>It was heartening to learn that SubEthaEdit was made free and open-sourced a week ago. [2]<p>[1] Alas, the coloured formatting didn’t survive the blogrot <a href="http://www.zenspider.com/ruby/2006/04/canadaonrails-day-1-shared-notes.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.zenspider.com/ruby/2006/04/canadaonrails-day-1-sh...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://subethaedit.net" rel="nofollow">https://subethaedit.net</a>
Way to go, repl.it team!<p>Hard to believe 7 months have already gone by since I was working with you on this prototype! I took a peek at some of the websocket messages, and I'm glad to see its come a long way since I last saw it :-D<p>This launch seems to perfectly cover the vision of collaborative coding that the repl.it community has been clamoring for!
> The fact that everyone shares the same compute infrastructure means they all see the same errors and the same output — this is crucial for collaboration and something that we've found to be lacking from existing IDE's that support "collaboration".<p>What does this do that VS Live Share [1] in VS Code doesn’t? Seems like port sharing + tty sharing has this covered.<p>1. <a href="https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/" rel="nofollow">https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/</a>
Awesome! A few times I've had to code together with my girlfriend and went for repl.it as a reflex, checked if it supported this feature or not because it seemed like it could! (Great (free??) product!) We would then use cloud9, but now it seems like that won't be necessary!!
This is really cool! I oftentimes use repl.it to explain a concept or something to friends learning programming, this will be really helpful!<p>Since people are recommending other multiplayer-stuff I'll recommend Live Share for VS Code [0]. It is so useful that I've shifted to VS Code (with my teammates) for some projects just for the live sharing. I've tried Floobits (to be able too keep my regular editor), but that seems much more elaborate with persistent "projects" which is not really a fit for my more casual use case.<p>[0]: <a href="https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/" rel="nofollow">https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/</a>
This is really cool. I dreamed of something like this back when I first started coding in college, but there wasn't really anything available that could do the job.
I just signed up because I wanted to be able to clone a git repo into a repl and pair program as needed. There doesn't appear to be an easy way to do this, I figured it would be the obvious feature especially with the GitHub login option.<p>Apparently it is do-able with a little effort, but man I'd love for this to be a standard feature. "Hey Jim, I just pushed to the funky-broken branch, can you take a look and help me solve it?"<p><a href="https://tra38.github.io/blog/deploying-github-repos-onto-repl-it.html" rel="nofollow">https://tra38.github.io/blog/deploying-github-repos-onto-rep...</a>
This is super-cool tool for performing tech interviews.
I've used a coderpad.io in the past (as interviewer) but they have way too high prices for the amount of interviews I've performed.<p>So when I've run out of free pads I've switched to repl.it + screen sharing, but it's not the same as simultaneous editing.<p>Really happy with it.
Here are some online programming sites similar to repl.it (not for the multiplayer part though) that I had come across, blogged about, and mentioned on HN some weeks ago:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18277513" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18277513</a>
Very cool. This looks almost perfect for having a shared environment for teaching my nephews how to make browser games. Only issue is it appears the multiplayer sessions are not persistent? ie what I really need is a shared project where different participants can log in and hack on it as they have time, but also pair if someone runs into a problem and needs realtime help fixing it. I think cloud9 works this way. @amasad Any chance of repl.it supporting this case in the future (or maybe it alread y does and I'm missing it)? This is something I would gladly pay a subscription for.
It's funny that I had just used it in class 2 days ago. It's such a great way to communicate and work on a project without actively disrupting a lecture that is actually unrelated to the code we were writing.
I wish there was a service which allowed collaborative code editing without registration/an account. Some years ago I used Gobby/Sobby [0] for such use-cases but using a website would make the whole thing much easier than having to install some software first.<p>[0]: <a href="https://gobby.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://gobby.github.io/</a>
I got inconsistent state that never resolved: <a href="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/772305/49634210-52bd1b80-f9fc-11e8-813c-1f3b362456e5.PNG" rel="nofollow">https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/772305/49634210-52...</a><p>This was on the first try. :-(
I wonder whether there's ever been much momentum within google to add programming language modes to google docs. It must have been suggested plenty of times internally. I mean, I hope not, for the sake of smaller companies like repl.it.
Heh, I don't know how this keeps happening, but I literally just had this idea today. I almost sent it to a friend who's looking for project ideas, but I'm super glad repl.it is building it. This looks great.
This is cool. By the way I just tried it and ran a simple infinite loop (in Python) and the whole page goes unresponsive and I don't seem to have a way to terminate the process?
I wanted to build something like this for a long time, but I never figured out the best tech & architecture to make it. I'm looking forward for a technical post :)