CoVim: Incorporating real-time collaboration capabilities into comprehensive text editors

Collaboration among programmers with different expertise and skill sets is becoming highly essential as many software systems are getting larger and more complex. The CoVim project aims to incorporate advanced real-time collaboration capabilities into Vim, one of the most popular source code editors, using the Transparent Adaptation (TA) approach. This work has extended TA from GUI-based applications (e.g. MS Word, MS PowerPoint, and Autodesk Maya) to complex keyboard-oriented applications like Vim. This work also contributed a novel state-centric operation derivation approach for TA, which is generic and more efficient in supporting a range of real-time editing features, compared to prior TA's interception-centric operation derivation approach which is user-interaction dependent and application specific.