The main advantage is that you can collaborate with people using other IDEs. So I could be using VSC, other person Webstorm and a third one Vim.

Live Share works in both Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code (dunno, maybe VS Mac as well) - if you're in a dotnet shop that covers most cases.

I tried live share. It didn't work. It didn't not work with a clear error message either. It didn't work by having a loading bar that simply never finished.

The browser version of live code did work, but no. I'm not doing that.

I used to use zoom for pair programming. It got banned because, as you said, Large Enterprise Company. Microsoft lobbied them with "trust us: the company behind skype knows how to write secure software. force uninstall zoom on all your employee computers if you know what's good for you". Microsoft corporate sales are wizards.

Since zoom bombing was a thing and we couldn't be trusted to set our own passwords, I also tried using Microsoft Teams to pair program. It was absolutely unusable (e.g. if you type the keyyyyyyyssssss willlll stickkkkk).

GitDuck is probably lovely. It's a shame neither of us can use it.

I don't use VS Code, and I'm not going to switch IDEs for code sharing. I am more likely to try GitDuck since my colleagues who use VS Code can also use it.

What IDE do you use?

Having used both VS Code Live Share, and trying out GitDuck last week for the first time, I'd say it felt like a much more immersive experience than the VS Code Live Share experience.

For VS Code Live Share I kept finding myself opening up Zoom and then in parallel trying to get Live Share running, which also feels somewhat finicky at times. The GitDuck experience felt a lot more complete by integrating at a different level. It also felt like it could eventually be a more suitable experience for things we often do in interviews like try to do coding interviews by combining tools like CoderPad & Zoom - though CoderPad has the nice side effect of preservice links to the interviews themselves.

nobody's mentioned them so i'll toss them in here - https://tuple.app/ is also focused on the pair programming problem.

I don't believe they have IDE integration, but like others have said, Tuple + Live Share would be a competitor to GitDuck. Glad to see more attempts at the space though!

Hah, Tuple's motivation headline laments that time "Slack stole Screenhero from us".. I can certainly relate!

Fortunately the Screenhero founder has been freed from Slack, and has rebuilt it! (with promises that it will not suffer the same fate)

https://screen.so

Screen is an awful name. Recently I tried installing it. I knew the name and I tried googling to no avail for the webpage (screen share, screen code share, screen, etc.). So I went with a competitor.

Screenking screenzilla screenolio screenmega screencaptain screenogogo screeniac screenscreen screenempire screenmirror any of those would be better.

Can't say I've ever encountered a startup selling an "Enterprise" plan but their software also ONLY supporting Mac.

Are there enterprises where they use Mac as default over Windows / Linux?

Well, anecdata I suppose, but I know plenty of startups where developers are exclusively mac. Not the showstopper you might imagine.

Seems very odd to assume that every single engineer is using VS Code, thus making this a third part dependency.

Honestly it's not a ridiculous assumption. Right now, in web-startup-land, it's a very high percentage. Exceptions would be the unix tool users - vim/emacs - and I suppose they would be expected to temporarily embrace VSCode for the sharing session.

I guess they are probably just starting and the claims on their website are too far-fetched. I might give it a try if they come up with integration for JetBrains IDEs.

JetBrains is coming in the next few days! We are already using it internally.

cross IDE compatibility. VSLS only works with MS products