Each share your screen with the other. If you have monitor 1 and 2 on your machine and the other person has monitor 3 and 4 then you would set your monitor 2 to their monitor 3 and their monitor 4 to your monitor 1.

You can both see what’s going on what the other person is doing, collaborate with out slowing things down.

OS X has a utility called ScreenSharing built in. We used vim + screen + ssh for about 1 year but have since switched to screen sharing as it’s more natural. So far 2 years and counting. Skype is also a must.

Yea, we’ve played with a few different VNC clients. Leopard’s ScreenSharing, TinyVNC, and Chicken of the VNC.

Our problem was the latency, and using the other tools seemed to “fit” better for what we were trying to accomplish.

I’m not sure how our pairing differs from yours, but VNC is a bit overkill for our needs.

• Edit the same code
• Edit the same text (sometimes different than coding)
• Share a whiteboard (we’re still working on this one)
• See the same browser (we can do this through VPN)
• Audio comm

We found sharing a desktop didn’t help us much, and in fact due to the latency actually hurt us.

One question – how much do you actually remote pair on web app development?

Seems like you primarily use Screen/VIM, which is good for console-only stuff; but I find it lacking for real full-time remote pairing on web app development.

We like to use IDEs, either TextMate or IntelliJ Idea. Most of my co-workers don’t want to use Vim, and I can’t blame them, TextMate/Idea have a lot of benefits over VIM (come on with the flames, but that’s what we believe!).

Aside from the IDE, there is the issue of testing/debugging webapps and javascript. There are many things you just need to have a shared GUI to pair on: CSS layout/design, javascript testing (jsunit, screwunit, etc), integration testing (selenium, webrat, etc). I don’t see how you could get by with remote pairing on this without a shared GUI.

As for your problems with GUI sharing performance, check out my notes in my blog post and the comments. Aside from a couple of minor but annoying bugs, Leopard screen sharing is really nice IF you have a really good, fat, low-latency pipe.

Thanks for the post! – Chad

We really haven’t done a lot of remote pairing, but that’s something Janson and I need to make more time to experiment with this year.

Regarding the GUI vs Console, I’ve jumped around different IDE’s such as Netbeans, Eclipse, and IntelliJ back when I developed a lot of Java. When I first started working with Ruby, I even started in Eclipse, but quickly migrated to TextMate (which is our current editor of choice). In my opinion, while I admit IDE’s have some nice-to-have features, the features they provide haven’t been a deal breaker when developing in Ruby. In fact most of the time they get in my way. My typical solo development involves TextMate with 2-3 terminal tabs open.

To be honest, we haven’t had to figure out remote pairing yet. So all my opinions are based on conjecture. If I were to theorize though, I would think we could overcome most of the hurdles doing remote console development.

First multiple tabs help tremendously, and can be easily done by starting/connecting to multiple screen sessions. Regarding CSS layout/design and Javascript testing, if we’re on a VPN, that means we hit the same server (in our case it’s generally a mongrel). For integration tests, we currently use Cucumber/Webrat so we granted the console freedom, but I could see how using Selenium may present a problem. Lastly, while this seems silly, Apple’s quick screenshot-to-desktop (Command-Shift-4) is really handy when trying to give someone context without VNC/Shared GUI sent through IM/Campfire.

Then again, once we are tasked with figuring out remote pairing and we compare different solutions I may change my mind and argue for GUI+IDE. I can always be persuaded by sound logic.