What’s Next?

You’ve learned about some essential pair-programming tools. The ability to collaborate entirely from the terminal is important, and a kind of lowest common denominator for pairing. But the application of these tools is not limited to pair programming. Many developers use tmux, PhantomJS, and, of course, Vim in their daily solo programming.

You may find that it helps to try additional tools that either supplement or replace tmux and Vim. I’ve listed a few suggestions here:

GNU Screen^[49]

An aging full-screen window manager that multiplexes terminals among processes in a way similar to tmux. It includes a few unique features, such as file transfers with the zmodem protocol, but it lacks some tmux features, such as vertical window-splitting.

CoVim^[50]

A plug-in that adds real-time collaboration features to the Vim text editor. Its maintainers describe it as “Google Docs for Vim.” CoVim enables features that are similar to tmux’s, but it lacks support for tools outside of Vim—such as a shared command prompt.

wemux^[51]

A Mac OS X tool that enhances tmux to make multiuser terminal multiplexing both easier and more powerful. It allows users to host a wemux server and have clients join in various modes that support mirroring, shared cursors, and separate cursors.

ls-pair^[52]

The programmers at LivingSocial, a daily-deal website, created this small set of tools as a baseline environment for doing remote pair programming via SSH. It consists of wemux, a default configuration for tmux and Vim, and a few other niceties.

All of these terminal-based tools, including tmux and Vim, have their limitations, though. They won’t help us share graphics or visual components of our applications. They are optimized to work best without a mouse, and they require that both programmers share relatively strong skills with the same terminal-based editor. If you know how to use only Vim and your partner knows how to use only Emacs, then you’ll likely be hamstrung by the difficulty of one party learning a new system. In Chapter 6, ​Collaborating with an IDE​, we’ll discuss how to use editors that don’t suffer from this problem.

But first, let’s go to a café and continue our tmux session over a cup of coffee. In the next chapter, you’ll learn how to pair-program from any location on the planet, including cafés with heavily locked-down routers.