I work from both at home and at school with my friends. At school, all ports except port 80 and port 443 (HTTP/HTTPS) are blocked, so it's hard to set up a collaborative "workspace".
I'm looking for a program that will create a virtual folder on our desktop (like Groove) which we can put our project in, and when we write our file to the disk (with the text editor or IDE of our choice), the changes will automatically be disseminated across all of the computers.
It should be portable (no admin rights required), and it should preferably be free.
Has this type of program even been made yet?
Here's what I've tried so far:
- Google Drive/Dropbox. The interface is too clumsy, and I am not allowed to install the client because admin permission is required. Plus, you have to announce to everyone else that you are uploading your copy of the project, and then everyone else has to stop what they are doing and download the project again. It's annoying and painful.
- GitHub. While it's a pretty viable option, my friends know little on how to use Git, and I fear that they will get locked in a merge conflict (which they have before), they will force push and lose all of the history, or just not commit anything at all.
- Saros for Eclipse. Requires Jabber ports to be open for outgoing connections, which they're not. I've had to run Openfire (Jabber server) locally in order to use this, but I forgot to back up the configuration, so Openfire was lost forever when the IT management decided to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7.
- NppNetNote for Notepad++. Perfect, but only supports one-to-one collaboration.
- SharePoint Workspace. This looks pretty cool, but I'm not quite sure how to invite other members.
- Etherpad. You can't use your own IDE, meaning that you have to copy/paste your version of a file to the pad. Plus, it's only for collaborating in a single file.
- Floobits. My friend tried to use this on Sublime Text, but it requires you to connect to a non-HTTP port (blocked).
- Firepad for Atom. Sadly, you cannot share an entire codebase with this.
- Slack. You can certainly share code, but like Google Drive, the zip, upload, announce, download process is too clumsy to be practical.
- Nothing. Only one person can code at a time. If multiple people code at the same time, somebody must eventually ask for each collaborator's working source and merge all files together manually.