One feature the team purposely left out of the editor for now is an in-page chat. Given how many users already us IM or IRC already, this wasn't a priority for the team, though this might come in a later version.

Try It

If you want to give Bespin's collaboration a quick spin, here are some instructions courtesy of Bespin developer Joe Walker:

• Sign up or login to Bespin.
• Press CTRL+J/CMD+J to open the command line.
• Type 'follow joewalker' to get someone to share files with. Joe shared a project called pubproj globally.
• Type 'project list'. You should see joewalker+pubproj in your list of projects.
  Type 'set collaborate on' to turn on shared editing.
• Open a shared file by typing 'open /joewalker+pubproj/example.txt'.
• You should then be in a collaborative editing session with the rest of the Internet.
• Click on the collaboration icon (2 people) in the top right hand corner to show you who's editing with you.

For more details about Bespin itself, have a look at our earlier coverage.

The "initial experimental prototype" features an impressive editing environment - with syntax highlighting, undo, import/export, and "preview in the browser," a command line, and a decidedly collaborative bent. There are also some thoughtful touches - like the blinking cursor.

All of that functionality stems from the Bespin team's goal of creating an HTML editor that mimicked existing editing environments and met developers' primary coding needs - while improving accessibility by divorcing it from the desktop.

Bespin's defining principles include:

• Ease of Use -- the editor experience should not be intimidating and should facilitate quickly getting straight into the code
• Real-time Collaboration -- sharing live coding sessions with colleagues should be easy and collaboratively coding with one or more partners should Just Work
• Integrated Command-Line -- tools like vi and Emacs have demonstrated the power of integrating command-lines into editors; Bespin needs one, too
• Extensible and Self-Hosted -- the interface and capabilities of Bespin should be highly extensible and easily accessible to users through Ubiquity-like commands or via the plug-in API
• Wicked Fast -- the editor is just a toy unless it stays smooth and responsive editing files of very large sizes
• Accessible from Anywhere -- the code editor should work from anywhere, and from any device, using any modern standards-compliant browser

Get Coding

"Even though this is a tech preview, where the goal was to share it with the community, we wanted to make the editor as solid as possible. It had to scale to a large number of lines and continue to remain very responsive."

All it takes is a browser - like Firefox 3 - that supports the HTML 5 technology that underlies Bespin. We were able to register, boot up the editor, and begin coding within a matter of seconds. The interface was incredibly responsive. We didn't experience any lag or delays - the one caveat being that we weren't trying any heavy coding either.

It's clear that a great deal of thought and attention went into this early version - and it's a safe bet that it will only get more impressive as time goes on.

Dig Deeper

We hope you'll take an opportunity to test drive Bespin. And then, we'd love to hear how close it comes to meeting your expectations of a "dream editor."