Introduction
Rudel is a collaborative editing environment for GNU Emacs. Its purpose is to share buffers with other users in order to edit the contents of those buffers collaboratively. It supports multiple backends to enable communication with other collaborative editors using different protocols (most notably Gobby). For details about supported protocols and compatibility with other implementations, have a look at the compatibility page. A list of complete, partial and planned backends is on the backends page. There is also a page in the EmacsWiki.
Since Rudel is not an application, but an extension to Emacs, it is not started and used like most applications (not even Emacs applications like Gnus). Rudel mostly works in the background to change the behavior of the set of Emacs buffers for which it has been activated. These do not even have to have a certain minor mode enabled.
The user interface of Rudel consists of a set of key bindings, a menu entry and some visual status indicators, which are added to the text and mode line of buffers for which Rudel has been activated. This user interface is realized as a global minor mode. A list of Rudel modes can be found on the modes page.
Download
Archives of released versions can be downloaded from the download area of the Sourceforge project page.
Development versions are available via the Subversion and Bazaar repositories on Sourceforge. Use the checkout instructions to obtain a copy of the source tree or just browse the code: Bazaar repository, Subversion repository. The Bazaar repository is updated on a regular basis, the Subversion repository is synced now and then.
For installation instructions, please refer to the INSTALL file.
Development
If you would like to contribute to Rudel by submitting patches or reporting bugs, use the issue tracker or the mailing list. When reporting bugs, please make sure to include the Emacs version, the Rudel version and a descriptions of the steps that lead to the bug.
Contact
To reach Rudel developers and users, you can write an email to the Rudel mailing list.
Alternatively, you can try the #rudel channel on the freenode.net IRC network. The main developers are known as scymtym and technomancy.
For long term contributions, becoming a member of the Sourceforge project is more appropriate. If you are interested, drop me a line: (concat "scymtym" "@" "users.sourceforge.net").
