Wrapping Up Code With Me EAP 2021.2
Hi everyone, it’s the Code With Me team here! It’s already been two months since we announced the public release of Code With Me, a service for remote pair programming and collaborative coding. Time flies! First of all, we want to thank everyone who tried Code With Me, shared their opinion, reported bugs, and sent in their suggestions about our collaborative coding tool. It’s only because of feedback like this that Code With Me can evolve and become more valuable for software development teams.
In particular, we want to thank the Rider community for their patience and persistence. We hear you, and we are pushing ourselves to make Code With Me compatible with this IDE as soon as possible.
We are also happy to announce that we have our own Twitter account which will keep you updated on all things Code With Me. Feel free to follow us and share your stories and insights there.
After that shameless plug, let’s talk about some of the major changes we’ve been working on for Code With Me EAP 2021.2:
New and shiny
Code completion overhaul
Code completion got lots of attention from the Code With Me user community. So, with your feedback in mind, we have completely redesigned the way it works.
Code completion used to receive a lot of suggestions from the host and tried to work with them on the guest’s side. Oftentimes, filtering and sorting these suggestions didn’t work as expected and results were inconsistent.
We are now doing a lot of work on the backend to ensure that guests’ completion results are exactly the same as they would have been for the host. Revamped code completion brings more stability to collaborative coding, and it works perfectly no matter how many guests are using it at the same time.
A more immersive experience for followers
One of the most popular Code With Me scenarios is when one developer leads and others follow in view-only mode. As a follower, it’s essential to be able to see everything that the leader sees on their screen. If anything is missing, it’s easy to lose track of what’s going on, and that’s not cool. We fixed a bug that prevented followers from seeing the lead’s lookup. Now everyone will see exactly what the host sees.
Python console in Code With Me
We have some excellent news for all PyCharm users out there: Code With Me EAP 2021.2 supports the Python console! During a collaborative coding session, the py-peers can review the code while a host goes on to test anything in the interactive console. It comes complete with all the usual benefits: on-the-fly syntax checking with inspections, braces and quotes matching, and code completion.
Remember, this is not a horror movie, so it’s ok to split up.
Better collaborative performance around the world
Code With Me recently launched a new relay server on the west coast of the US. This has made the ping almost three times faster, and it allows teams from that location to collaborate in their JetBrains IDEs at the speed of thought.
Noteworthy improvements
- We’ve added support for proxies that use authentication, an extra step you can take to make your collaborative development sessions more secure.
- We’ve improved highlighting in the inspection widget. When guests change the highlighting level, for instance from “All problems” to “None”, the highlighting will change accordingly for everyone in the session.
- With new updates, the inline rename now works properly for guests.
- We’ve added SBT tool window support.
- The NPM, Gulp, and Grunt tool windows are now supported for WebStorm users.
- We’ve implemented a variety of debugger fixes and improvements.
What’s next?
One of the significant milestones on the Code With Me roadmap is making our tool available for Android developers. We were delighted to receive numerous requests from Android Studio users. Currently, our teams are working together to introduce support for Code With Me in the Android Studio Canary builds. If you are interested in influencing the Beta version, you can run IntelliJ IDEA with the Android plugin. This way, you can do some coding with your peer Android developers and test Code With Me in action. As for now, there are some limitations in terms of functionality, so we would appreciate any suggestions you have about which toolbox windows we should add for the Beta version. Here is the ticket where you can add them!
As we mentioned above, Rider support is definitely one of our key priorities.
We’ve also made progress on the highly anticipated Remote Development tool that will enable a source-code-free remote development environment, and the beta version is coming in Q3 2021.
Stay tuned for more updates, and reserve your spot among the beta testers.
Useful links
- Code With Me Twitter – follow for the most up-to-date information and useful tips
- Online Help Center – get started with Code With Me
- Code With Me Enterprise Free Trial – set up collaborative sessions in your network for extra security and compliance
As we continue to make Code With Me more and more awesome, we welcome any feedback you have. Try all these improvements in 2021.2 EAP version of your JetBrains IDE and let us know what you think in the comments below or via the survey on the bottom of your screen.
Cheers,
The Code With Me team
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