Remote Pair Programming in IntelliJ

Question

Herabouts there's a move to have team members working from home.

Occasionally we would like to pair.

This is now difficult.

Any way of doing it in IntelliJ?

We're using versions 7 and 8, but if a solution for v9 appeared it would be good prompt to get mgt to upgrade us all.

The question is a bit like this question, but for IntelliJ users instead.

And also similar to another question of mine here which relates to mixed environments.

Answer 1

For simple working from home, I can start a vncserver session on my box at work, then start vncviewer to connect to that session, start up all my design tools (including IntelliJ). When I get to work, I connect to the corporate network and run a second instance of vncviewer. I'm not sure what the limits are, but I've had vncviewer running on both my laptop and my (work) desktop before, with the input from both keyboards and mice fighting it out. I've never done pair programming, but I thought the idea is two sets of eyes/fingers but on monitor/keyboard. Add skype and you may have all you need.

Answer 2

A good alternative to VNC is screenhero. It's very lightweight, but unfortunately does not support Linux.

Floobits creates a pairing session at the IDE level. It supports many popular IDEs from IntelliJ, Eclipse, to emacs.

Answer 3

There is an effort to bring the Saros Eclipse plugin to the IntelliJ platform:

www.saros-project.org

Saros for IntelliJ - the plan

Answer 4

There is an open request for this feature. You can vote there and maybe that would be implemented at some stage.

http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEABKL-708

Answer 5

This tool looks promising. It's called Floobits and here is a link to an IntelliJ Idea blog post about it. Let's you conference, share code, and even edit the same file at the same time.

Answer 6

If you can switch to Eclipse you can try: http://www.eclipse.org/ecf/

Here you have some screenshots: http://wiki.eclipse.org/DocShare_Plugin

For idea, the most I can think of is: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/webhelp/idetalk.html