Good question. In general, what happens to this setup when two programmers use different editors, say vim/Emacs/TextMate?

Sometimes both programmers just keep using their favorite editors.

At my last job, we had a more typical pairing setup with one machine (27" imac) in the middle of two programmers. When I paired with a non-Emacs user, we'd put Emacs on my half of the screen and their editor (usually Vim, occasionally Textmate) on their half.

The only caveat is that you have to make sure your editor will refresh files when they change on disk. That way, when your pair saves a file, your editor reflects the changes.

Textmate does this automatically; in Emacs, you may have to put

  (global-auto-revert-mode 1)

in your init.el, and there's some Vim setting you can tweak to get the same behavior.

The main downside is that you can only fit half as much code on the screen, but this can be mitigated by using a sufficiently large screen. In my experience, a 27" display is sufficiently large and a 24" is pretty good, but anything smaller starts to feel cramped.

It sucks. I just started a new job with lots of pair programming and all vim users. Struggle.

Quit complaining. You could have ended inside a Visual Studio shop...

See? I could be much worse.

Yeah, I use vim too. I was thinking they'd just pair off vim and Emacs people with their own kind.

We actually require Emacs at work, but that's because we're all pairing remotely over SSH and we're all lisp hackers anyway.

I've used SubEthaEdit for pair programming in the past, and it was very successful and awesome. I was hosting it as such I was not aware of any latency, but my partner never really complained about it.

It also provided both of us with the ability to see the others changes.

I've not tried pair programming using collaborative editor but I've done sessions of requirements gathering with teams using EtherPad (I guess now it would be Google Docs given Etherpad was rolled into Google Docs).

It's fun and almost LAN game like in terms of having everyone create stub items, then others go in and fill them out, then someone else goes in and further adds to that given item, etc etc.

I can't describe how helpful this is for some of the open source projects that I contribute too. Sometimes it's hard enough getting folks to review patches, etc, but getting people to write docs is like pulling teeth at times. This makes it way easier to tweet or announce in IRC that a doc is being edited and in no time you can have 4-5 people working on it and it's finished in a fraction of the time.

BTW, Etherpad was released as an open source project (https://github.com/ether/pad seems to be where the development lives) as part of the acquisition and there are tons of clones out there if you still want to use something simply with no sign-in, etc.

Check out: http://piratepad.net/ep/search or http://typewith.me/

With Emacs you can open a window (frame, em Emacs-ese) on another display. If both run X, you can make that display be your colleague's. The new window responds to keyboard and mouse activity from both workstations and both share the same editing buffer.

javery and I basically pair program during our TekPub recordings, using SharedView and Skype. The hosting SharedView user has asymmetrically better control of the editor, but it still works out great for us.

Not quite the same as a collaborative editor, but similar.