[Feedback] I atom real-time'd, and lived to tell about it

[jbjonesjr]

So I did some realtime pairing with @hiimbex this week, and was super impressed with the experience and functionality it provided. It's like it opened up a whole new world of possibilities.

I did have some issues/thoughts/feels about it though, and wanted to share them back. I don't know if anything is necessarily a bug, but I at least hope it's valuable to get another first-time user experience data point.

• I copied the portal id to my clipboard. i opened the join dialog and it was already there. That's... awesome.
  • Would be cool if there was a registered uri handler so I don't have to copy it though
• I use the vim-mode plugin to get vi keybindings. When the cursor is not in INSERT mode, it is not colored (so you can't tell who is who). Also it changes the cursors for everyone pairing, but that wasn't as big of an issue.
• For the next feedback, it is related to my experience as a real time session consumer, not the owner/controller.
  • The whole thing where if the "session owner" changes the file, your file changes is problematic when you're mid keystroke. I don't know a better solution, but it was funky.
  • There was some weird things that caused the current scroll position to jump around. I don't know if we ever figured out what was causing it (I'd be looking at like X, @hiimbex was doing something (scrolling? page up/down? editing text? no clue), and my screen would jump down to her position.
• I really missed have the project/file view to see what other files were available. We were looking for tests to copy, and without seeing the directory structure myself, I was little help.
• Along with seeing other files, it would be nice to be able to have other files available for me to peruse and copy text/etc.
• Similar to how it works when you are taking a screencast, it would be interesting if there were other ways to highlight sections of the editor without doing text selection (show click actions, etc). Maybe it was just how we were interacting, but to me, it was just as much paired typing as it was collaboration, education, and exploration. Having additional focus and annotation tools would be interesting. This also seems horribly out of scope, but feedback is feedback.

Anyway, this was super cool, and totally changes the way I can work on documents in a group. Would use again :)

[jasonrudolph]

@jbjonesjr: Thank you for trying out the package, and thank you for taking the time to provide such thoughtful feedback. 💟 While working on the feature, we've had some similar observations, especially around the experience as a real time session consumer.

This also seems horribly out of scope, but feedback is feedback.

😆 This early in the process, I prefer to have all the feedback we can get. 😄

[jasonrudolph]

/fyi @nathansobo @as-cii

[nathansobo]

Thanks for submitting this.

• Interesting points about vim-mode. I think we can add some classes to the cursor to help indicate which participant owns them, but fully relaying state about which mode other participants are in will probably require some sort of API on the real-time package itself. Definitely something we should keep in mind and great early feedback.
• As for not being able to see other files, we're planning on adding another feature in addition to portals called "live branches" which does a full replica of every outstanding change in your working copy, which would allow you to navigate independently. We're anticipating pairs having a portal open to each other in one split pane and their own navigation in another, which would allow you to see what each other are doing while still navigating independently. Would that work for you?
• As for the scrolling weirdness, we've experienced that as well. It's definitely something we plan to pay careful attention to and refine as we move forward, once we get a basic architecture in place that we can scale to the whole GitHub user population.

[jbjonesjr]

live branches

YES! As writing this up, I was thinking "well, we could both clone the repo, so we have all the files in front of us, so that gets me some of the way there to having file access." But then I realized that my files would be out of date, we'd have to push/pull constantly, it would stink. I even then even thought about could spokes help me here?

Whatever live branches is, sounds like the answer. So great. My only sort of request/thought would be to make it easier to get this sort of shared state (portal opens, live branch gets added to the project if it doesn't exist) up and running. Don't be afraid to be prescriptive about what this whole experience can look/function like.

Thanks for the feedback.

[hiimbex]

I think @jbjonesjr pointed out some great things. And overall the experience was lovely!

We're anticipating pairs having a portal open to each other in one split pane and their own navigation in another, which would allow you to see what each other are doing while still navigating independently

My one word of feedback was going to be it would be nice to have a jump-to button, to jump to wherever the other person is working. We happened to be trekking through a 7000 line file and trying to tell each other what line number to go to.

Also generally, I think it would be nice to have better cursor visibility like how in google docs has a little square at the top of your cursor so it stands out more amongst the text. That could also help with the vim issue.

Hope this feedback helps! :)

[jasonrudolph]

@jbjonesjr @hiimbex: Thanks again for trying out the package and sharing your feedback. 🙇⚡

We'll be using this feedback and the feedback from the upcoming beta release to determine the priority of future enhancements. With that in mind, I'm going to close this issue for now. Depending on the feedback from the beta release, we might extract individual ideas from this issue into standalone issues for prioritization.