We had covered list of best text editors (stand alone) in our previous post. In this post, we will cover collaborative real time text editors.

Collaborative tools are designed to help people involved in a common task achieve their goals. Team work is essential when you are writing a document and if multiple people can look into the single text, edit it collaboratively, know what changes were done by different people etc features would definitely boost the productivity to a certain extent. There are big players like Google Docs in Office 2.0 domain and they claim that they offer collaborative document editing features but in reality it is not true. There will always be a few seconds delay in other person knowing the changes done on the common document. Etherpad claims that it is as high as 15 seconds.

Well, it is not much but if you want absolutely no delay for a change to make its way from your keyboard to other people’s screens, then don’t worry, there are such real time collaborative text editors and we have listed them below. These are very neat and evolving tools and you need to check them out.

Google Docs

Google docs is an efficient set of word processing and presentation tools that can be used in real time. Even ThinkFree can be explored

Etherpad (Browser based)

Etherpad lets multiple work on the same text simultaneously. Changes by multiple people can happen at real time something which is not supported by Google Docs. No account or registration is required to get started. that’s nice. Different edits are color coded according to the user and that gives an idea on who changed what. Infinite undo history, Syntax highlighting etc features really bring in collaborative environment. As per Etherpad, GoogleDocs takes 15 seconds to broadcast the changes to the other participants where as EtherPad just takes a half a second. If that matters a lot to you, then you need to check out EtherPad.

To share your pad, you just have to share the URL and others can instantly access your text pad.

SynchroEdit (Browser based)

SynchroEdit is a browser-based multiuser editor. It allows multiple users to share a single XML/HTML or text document, edit the document the same time, and synchronize changes so that all users have the same version. SynchroEdit only works under Gecko-based browsers (Firefox, Camino, Flock, etc.) at the moment

Collabedit (Browser based)

Collabedit is another browser based collaborative text editor. It is basically a source editor that supports, C, C++, Java and a lot more languages. Very neat and light weight editor that does not need any login or registration.