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Ask HN: alternatives to EtherPad?

71 points by jeff18 ↗ HN
EtherPad was probably the most useful web app I have ever used. The main use case of EtherPad for me was that I embedded it into my startup's blog, so that we could seamlessly collaborate on blog posts together and it would auto-save, etc.

Now that EtherPad has been killed, what are some alternatives? Is there any other embeddable, collaborative text editor out there?

It looks like old EtherPads are still active for the next couple months, so until March, I will probably be abusing the crap out of a poor, used EtherPad. It would be great to migrate onto a more permanent solution though.

59 comments

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Alex3917
SubEthaEdit: http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/

This is what EtherPad was based on. The only problem is that it only works on OS X. I remember using it to take notes with a bunch of other people at the first couple Startup School events. I haven't really ever used it since, but I can say that it held up extremely well even with a dozen people typing as fast as they could all at once.

jeff18
SubEthaEdit is awesome, and I bought a copy for ~$45 back in the day. However, because it is expensive and a Mac OS X only desktop application, I have only had opportunity to use it maybe once or twice. :(
mahmud
$45 is not expensive for anyone in a developed country, specially as a business expense. That's how much you would pay for a decent dinner for one and 2 drinks by the glass.
JoelSutherland
Anything that costs money is expensive given the right (wrong?) circumstances.
jeff18
Given that most text editors are free, $45 is relatively expensive. Especially when, until this afternoon, an arguably superior product was available at no cost in your web browser.
j_baker
Erm.... Where do you live? Cuz I could probably buy two or three decent dinners for one and plenty of drinks by the glass for that much.
diN0bot
my husband and i don't eat out. in fact, we live in a cooperative with 7 other folks in order to efficiently share rent, utilities, grociers, chores and cooking. $45? oof. there's some software i pay for, but that's because it's worth it. as a startup software developer myself, i also feel empathetic to the cause. i rarely buy things because "it isn't expensive so why not."

it's true that this might not be strictly necessary. i could buy 7 etha edits a month or pay rent....and since i only need 1 etha edit forever, it's orders of magnitude less expensive compared to rent.

still, the numbers just tell me why it might be ok to make the purchase. if i threw away 1/7th of rent every month that would add up to a non-trivial amount. so, yeah, it better be worth it.

aditya
If you're looking for collaborative code editors, Mozilla's bespin is (going to be) epic: https://bespin.mozilla.com/
jeff18
This looks like the most promising successor. Unfortunately it does not look like you can embed a collaborative pad or share it via a link. You need to register an account, go through Mozilla's website, and actually use the command line to join up. Why a website has a command line is a little beyond me!
dangoor
Bespin definitely does not have the same sort of "just start editing a shared document" user interface that etherpad does. That isn't really our primary goal.

As for the command line: I really wish TextMate had a command line. I truly think the command line is going to be one of Bespin's fantastic features (though I'll agree with anyone that it is not a replacement for other nice bits of UI).

(ObDisclaimer: I'm on the Bespin team.)

jeff18
"I truly think the command line is going to be one of Bespin's fantastic features"

No offense, but this is why EtherPad just got acquired for 8 figures and BeSpin is on track for obscurity.

grayrest
I'll point out that I doubt that amount EtherPad's purchase matters to a MOZILLA editor team and that the project being from Mozilla provides at least some guard against obscurity...
al3x
The guys who were really pushing Bespin forward went to Palm several months ago. The project looks great, but it may not have the same velocity right now.
dangoor
Ben and Dion left in September, just before we kicked off the "Bespin Reboot" project, which we had been planning since mid-summer. I believe we'll soon have much better velocity than we did previously, thanks to our work in the Reboot. (Reboot is not a rewrite, but a very significant rearrangement of the code.)

(I am on the Bespin team.)

spolsky
http://squadedit.com is a pretty similar service. The free version has too many flashing ads for my taste... hopefully they'll fix that!
jeff18
This is pretty epic -- the only problems are that it doesn't have an API to retrieve text from it or create a new pad. Also, it is not suitable for embedding. However, as a standalone editor this is the best alternative I've seen.

UPDATE: I take it all back. This product is junk. Only one person can edit the entire document at once. If someone is typing, it literally locks the entire screen. This is worse than Google Docs.

trotzke
The first version of Squad didn't lock people out, but after some testing we liked the lock out method for code review and help purposes.

The goggle wave everyone type at once stuff is like reverb in the 80's if you ask me. Too much.

Particularly when you are dealing with multiple tabs. What I want to do when I'm asking a buddy to take a look at or help me with code is see what he or she is doing.

The tool really wasn't designed to compete with/replace Etherpad. It was designed to make our lives as developers a little easier. I think Etherpad is awesome. I've used a ton for google docs type stuff, but never really thought of it as code editor.

jeff18
That's awesome that you've found a niche for you product, but it seems to me that with a weeks worth of tweaking, you could be the next EtherPad.
trotzke
Maybe down the road. We are only about 3 days old. :)
jeff18
Dude, if I were you, I'd drop everything I'm doing and try to push out a feature complete EtherPad replacement within the next few days. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who used to use EtherPad and are now stranded. Their product is tried and true and just vanished off the face of the planet because it was that good.

Why would you ignore that and try to carve a small niche for yourself for code reviews when the whole pie is right there for the taking?!

This will probably be the biggest opportunity your company will ever have in terms of user acquisition.

trotzke
I agree that as a company we're in great position to capitalize on this opportunity. Repurposing our core real-time editing technology to create something like EtherPad may be a very good idea. But turning Squad into EtherPad isn't.

The next direction for Squad is better project handling via a tree file browser, SFTP, version control hooks, etc. not adding formating buttons or making shares embedable. I think Squad and EtherPad were diverging like say Dreamweaver and Word. That's not to say we wouldn't like to capitalize on both the Dreamweaver and Word markets. :)

Here is my suggestion, I say you (or someone else passionate about this) go over to http://sproutbox.com/apply and fill out an app for recreating something like EtherPad. If you're selected, you'd be working with the same team that built Squad. We'd donate a big chunk of real-time editing code and you'd have something up around the time EtherPad shuts down. Win Win.

But hurry, apps close tomorrow at 11:59pm.

jeff18
Well, I hope that works out for you. Honestly, it sounds like you are going to be left by the roadside while a more nimble dude jumps in and capitalizes on the demise of EtherPad. Good night and good luck!
chris123
Our by Google, when they roll out EtherPad-like features to Google Docs. Oops.
futurephonic
I wouldn't want multiple collaborators editing my code all at once - I wouldn't know what they are doing. If I invite someone to collaborate I need to know what they changed before I redeploy the code.
rufo
EtherPad had colored background for each collaborator, as well as a timeline slider and saved revisions so you could see who did what at each point.
jeff18
You clearly never used EtherPad or SubEthaEdit.
jbyers
A big difference is it doesn't highlight or denote authors.
swombat
http://wave.google.com
jeff18
Wave is slightly similar in the technology depeartment but fundamentally different from EtherPad. :(
swombat
Wave offers a text editor that's embeddable and allows multiple concurrent edits (which is what the OP requested). Having used both Etherpad and Wave, I don't really see how they're that different. Wave has more features, that's all. If you don't want to use the other features of Wave, well, just don't use them.
jeff18
Well, I am the op, so let me elaborate.

By default, Wave creates new "boxes" for everything, or lets you reply to other boxes. These boxes cannot be rearranged, only deleted, or have the contents changed.

I don't give a crap about these boxes, I just want to edit a single document like EtherPad. To achieve this in Wave, have to arbitrarily agree on which box you want to make the "main" box. You then need to click the little tab on this box and choose "edit box" every single time you want to make a change to it.

You also can't track who has made what change in the same box. Also, your cursor turns into a long string (your name) that shifts everything around in an annoying manner.

It is sort of a cross between EtherPad, a chat client, and a wiki. I just want a text editor.

For reference: here is what an embedded Wave looks like: http://smarterware.org/my-favorite-google-wave-bots

durin42
Thank you, you just described what's bugged me about wave for a long time, I never really could put it into words why I liked EtherPad more, I just knew that I did.
lukifer
Wave is a pretty good collaborative workspace in general. However, it currently lacks tools specific to programming: auto-indenting, code auto-complete, syntax highlighting, etc. I imagine such tools will exist as Gadgets or somesuch in the near future.
cmelbye
This is somewhat possible if your needs are basic. There's a syntax highlighting bot called Syntaxy and of course Wave supports the collaborative editing part of it. It's the layout of Wave that prevents me from using it, though. It doesn't seem like it was structured to be something like EtherPad. Rather, it looks like it was structured to be the next email or forum or something.
vsiva68
Sorry for this OT question, but does anyone know of a replacement for Omnisio (http://www.omnisio.com/)? They had great integration of slides and video and how you could browse to a particular slide.

Another Google acquisition that hasn't seen the light yet.

johnnyg
My preferred alternative to Etherpad, is etherpad.

Etherpad is more popular than email in my office. I etherpad stuff, tag it with firefox bookmark tags and share it around. When this was announced, there was a literal, biblical gnashing of teeth.

Etherpad guys, I'm happy you're exiting with style but I will miss you badly. And if I could pay you instead of missing you, that'd be peachy.

bprater
Looks like a great opportunity for someone here!
skywalker
..until a big company acquires this new startup and kills their product again.

This is one more problem with the cloud computing era.

In the 90's, you could continue to use a product even after it was discontinued. I remember reading that Steve Wozniack is still an Eudora mail user. The last time I heard about Eudora was maybe 15 years ago. You can't say the same about the last startup product.

notauser
If you cut me a large enough check I'll install my cloud app in your data center, or sell you an off line version.

/notajoke

thesethings
I sincerely dig the word processor in Google Docs. It's quite good at handling multiple concurrent editors, and you can post to other platforms like WordPress from there.

The recently added Folders feature is killer, and my Google Docs "list view" has started to become like an Inbox for me in the beginning of my day, as it neatly displays newly edited, and newly added docs.

jeff18
Google Docs was awesome at the time, however, it is not really a real-time collaborative text editor. You have to coordinate your edits so that you are not working on the same thing, otherwise you create conflicts which are a pain in the ass.

Once you use a real-time collaborative editor like EtherPad, you can never go back to something like Docs, it's too primitive.

thesethings
I've never had to coordinate when I'm in the same doc as somebody at the exact same time. But I don't dispute your account. It's actually a quite interesting observation of how differently we all work.

In any case, I'll be following this thread. Tools aside, i think the topic is one of the most transformative things going on.

gfodor
I wouldn't be surprised if re-building etherpad would be a weekend project for a talented hacker, now that Wave is open source. The Wave protocol would allow you to replicate EtherPad pretty easily, you'd just need to build the appropriate UI on top.
jeff18
I'd pay $350 for the privilege of using it.
gfodor
Well, it is Friday... :)
RedKnight
beWeeVee Notepad is a techdemo but it works. It does more or less the same as Etherpad. It also have an SDK to develop applications on top of the Operational Transformation Technology.

The Url is: www.beweevee.com

jeff18
This one is so close it hurts!

It is almost a perfect clone of EtherPad, but it's written in Silverlight. Therefore, it's painfully slow, takes forever to load, and doesn't act like a standard Mac OS X text editor (ctrl-t to twiddle characters, for example, or ctrl-d for fwd delete.)

I am so desperate, I may have to bite the bullet and use this in the meantime though.

myprasanna
I am an early user of etherpad & loved it. I'm hosting and maintaining it here: www.ietherpad.com

Cheers.

chris123
I guess EtherPad-like features are coming to Google Docs. Now that will be sweet!