CoVim : converting Vim into a real-time collaborative editor

• Main Author: Saumya Mohan.
• Other Authors: Sun Chengzheng
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computer systems organization::Special-purpose and application-based systems
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/48595
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With the advance of globalization and information technology, there has been great emphasis on teamwork and collaboration across the globe. Today, geographic locations are no longer barriers to collaboration across distance but it is the unavailability of collaborative applications and platforms that serves as the bottleneck for real time collaboration. As a result, tremendous efforts have been made to provide collaboration capabilities in single-user applications. There exist many techniques for developing collaborative applications. Among them, Transparent Adaption technique that emphasizes on leveraging existing commercial off-the-shelf single-user applications has proved to be most successful in developing real-time collaborative platforms which are most familiar to users. This report describes this collaboration technique involving Transparent Adaption and Operational Transformation and includes how this framework is adapted to develop CoVim, a collaborative application based on single-user Vim editor. Although CoVim is a near-completion project, there exist some unsupported functionalities and unidentified problems. In this report, the author has identified all such functionalities and errors, discovered through comprehensive system testing. Solutions to some such identified problems and additional features are added to improve the current CoVim system are explained in detail in this report. This report also includes recommendations for future development and enhancement of CoVim.