I once used something called Floobits[1] that was capable of this. In practice collaborative editing wasn't that much more useful vs screen sharing and the additional constraints of managing Floobits workspaces didn't make it worth it for us.

[1] https://floobits.com/

What makes floobits awesome is that it could will allow someone using Vim and someone using Emacs to do pair programming.

And if you can make Emacs and vim users happy then you can have world peace.

The only problem we had with it, was that it was only 99% reliable... And that 1% error (in the connections dropping and such) was annoying.

But I still consider floobits a project with great potential.

I did pair programming on XEmacs in the 90's by opening a new frame on a second X server. It worked surprisingly well as long as both people stayed out of the minibuffer.

A.k.a. M-x make-frame-on-display. It’s nice, but it does not show the cursor of the other person, which makes it hard.

What happens when network drops? Do you have a chance to merge conflicts? Or one version wins?

That looks nice, however for those interested, only the plugins are opensource and usage is not free. The good thing is that it shows what is possible.

Not every tool we use has to be free.

i find collaborative editing most useful for online docs, like wiki pages, etc. not having to worry about locking makes a big difference when editing is fast paced

That is such a great idea. The need for a service like overleaf to provide an entire front-end + text editor is just ridiculous when there is already so much existing software out there. Multiple editors with realtime shared data + shared previewing tools totally should be a thing.

Try floobits.com is the implementation of this idea.

Wow that's pretty insane actually, thanks

Sounds like a good addition to the gobby/libinfinity project:

https://github.com/gobby/

This looks really cool. Do any text editors aside from Gobby support libinfinity?

Given that most links on http://www.infinote.org/ are dead, I suspect the answer is no.