Harness Drive's realtime features to collaborate in Sublime Text

There are several tools that allows you to remotely collaborate while coding. Most of them are web based and we think people don't like coding in browsers yet.

Just a few months ago, Google released Drive's realtime API that allows developers to utilize Docs' powerful collaboration features in their own web apps. Yep. Web apps. But most of us are already comfortable with coding in our own favorite editors may it be Vim, Emacs, Sublime Text, nano, ed, etc. A web based editor that uses Drive's realtime API is yet another software to learn and adapt too.

Enter Devcup 2013. The hackathon's theme this year was "Development". The idea of using Drive's realtime API to do collaboration in Sublime Text popped up while we were brainstorming and Overdrive became our project in the hackathon. We fell in love with it and now hopes to continue developing it.

It hasn't been a day (as of writing) after the hackathon so Overdrive is far from pretty yet. But it's realtively easy to install if you know what you're doing.

To get it, you basically just need to clone the repo into Sublime Text's Packages directory. Btw, you have to name it "Overdrive" (hard-coded values ftw). Setting up dependecies is a bit trickier. You need to have q, Bottle, Ghost.py and PySide/PyQT installed somewhere. Notice the AAA.py file? After installing dependencies, you need to modify that and set the paths so that the packages you just installed can be loaded. Most systems have python2.7 now by default and installing PySide/PyQT manually in a virtualenv could be a pain. It was for us, so we just used paths for the python2.7 versions and it worked :P

Once you have dependencies working (you can confirm by checking Sublime Text's console to see if modules are failing to load while Overdrive is being loaded), it's time to configure. You just need to create an Overdrive.sublime-settings file either in the package's directory or your User directory:

{
  "user_id": "GOOGLE_USER_ID",
  "access_token": "ACCESS_TOKEN",
  "server_host": "localhost",
  "server_port": 5000 // with the client ID we're using you can use 5000 or 3000
}

How do you get GOOGLE_USER_ID and ACCESS_TOKEN you say? I'll leave GOOGLE_USER_ID as a reading exercise :P But after getting your user ID, you can go to localhost:server_port (while Sublime Text with Overdrive installed is running), open up the developer tools console and run Overdrive.auth('GOOGLE_USER_ID'). This will try to auth you (pop-up could be blocked) and console.log a token object. It'll have an access_token. Put that in and we're done!

You should be able to share and join files after that. But note that access tokens expire after an hour so you need to manually get another one and update your settings when it does. Yeah it's very tedious and we'll surely change that but hey, it was for a hackathon so bear with it for a while or you can always hit that fork button ;)

Haven't discussed this one yet but it'll be permissive for sure :)