In this CodeTogether release we have beefed up the CodeTogether and Presence views, and introduced a truly seamless way of gaining control. With core stability fixes, this release provides the most unobtrusive pair programming experience yet – read on for the details.
Believe it or not, in the last couple of months, we’ve put out 5 preview releases of CodeTogether’s Eclipse plugin and VS Code extension. Thanks to detailed feedback and conversations we’ve had with early users, we’ve been able to add oft requested features to the product and make many key fixes and improvements. A serious amount of reliability work went into this release and we’re happy to announce that we’re now out of early access!
With this release, we’re debuting our IntelliJ support, and we mean the entire IntelliJ family of IDEs. Versions 2019.1 and higher of IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm, PyCharm, Rider, etc., are all supported. Here it is in action:
So what do we support in IntelliJ? Pretty much everything! Analysis and browsing capabilities like hyperlink navigation, inline reference display, a workspace content search, and even a super handy go to symbol action that’s great for navigating within files. On the coding front, we support the usual suspects like IntelliSense, formatting and validation. Please bear in mind though that this is an early access version, so you may experience a few glitches, but we’ll have those ironed out shortly.
Get a session started with the CodeTogether view, which presents a clear overview of your pair programming, or even mob programming session.
Participants can now just start typing into an active editor to take control. The first time you do this in a session, you’ll be asked whether you really meant to take control.
If you’d rather not be bothered by the question, select the “Take control automatically” checkbox, and your edits will make it to the file immediately, provided of course that nobody else is actively editing. The checkbox will retain its state for the session, or until the browser is reloaded.
Do remember that you can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl / Cmd + K C to explicitly request control.
The CodeTogether view in the IDEs and the Presence view in the browser have been given a significant upgrade. The views now clearly display who’s in control and whom members are being followed by – members who aren’t following others are listed under the Browsing section. Links to active and recently modified files allow you to easily open these files too. Participants also have a new Invite button in the Presence view that will copy the Invite URL to the clipboard so you can easily invite more developers to your programming session.
As a participant, if you have control, you can now format code. Right now you can only format the entire file, the ability to format selections is coming soon.
Are you someone who types at 14 characters per second while pressing backspace after every 5 strokes? Well, one of our testers is, and happened to find a bug that would break editor synchronization. This is now fixed and we’ve made the code responsible for relaying changes in both directions far more robust.For additional details, do check our delivery log.
If you have any feedback, comments, or feature requests, please reach out to us on Twitter or drop in for a chat with our team in our Gitter CodeTogether Community. And if you haven’t tried CodeTogether yet, what are you waiting for? It’s free!
