Simon Willison’s Weblog

Hydra: Collaborative text editing

8th April 2003

Via Sam Buchanan, Hydra is a remarkably innovative text editor that allows multiple users, via a network, to edit the same document at the same time and have it update live on each other’s screens. This screenshot probably demonstrates it best, showing multiple participants working on the same code simultaneously. The colour coding (where each person’s edits shows up in a different colour) is a particularly nice touch. Unfortunately, Hydra is only available for Mac OS X so I can’t try it out myself. Hopefully they’ll release the code at some point and let aspiring Windows / Unix hackers try and port it to their respective platforms.