Gobby is a multi-platform collaborative text editor. It allows multiple users to edit the same document together over the internet in real-time. It supports the following features:

• Runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X
• Full-fledged text editing capabilities including syntax highlighting using GtkSourceView
• Real-time, lock-free collaborative text editing
• Integrated group chat
• Group undo: Undo does not affect changes of remote users
• Shows cursors and selections of remote participants
• Highlights text written by different users with different colors
• Full Unicode support
• Zeroconf support (Linux-only at the moment)
• Encrypted data transfer including perfect forward secrecy (PFS)
• Sessions can be password-protected
• Sophisticated access control with Access Control Lists (ACLs)
• A highly configurable dedicated server
• Licensed under GPLv2+ and ISC

In order to get started, connectivity between the computers that plan to collaborate needs to be established. When they are in the same Wi-Fi network, Gobby usually lists the other computers running Gobby automatically on Linux. This feature is not available at the moment for Windows and Mac OS X. By pressing Ctrl+T or selecting the "Connect To Server" option in the menu, a connection can be made manually when the hostname or IP address of the other computer is known.

More technical users might want to run their own dedicated gobby server.