In January we released CodeTogether 2022.1 with a lot of new features and enhancements that we detailed in this blog. In the “What’s Next” section, we promised:

“We’re going to be working on improving the core coding functionality, making sure guests’ experiences in a CodeTogether session continue to coalesce with a local IDE dev experience.”

And with the delivery of CodeTogether 2022.1.1 through 2022.1.4 we focused on exactly that. Here’s a summary of all the nice enhancements and fixes in those releases, broken out by category for easy reference.

• General Improvements—For all CodeTogether users
• VS Code/Code-OSS IDEs—Improvements for VS Code-based IDEs
• IntelliJ/JetBrains IDEs—Improvements for IntelliJ-based IDEs
• Eclipse/Eclipse IDEs—Improvements for Eclipse-based IDEs
• Browser—More convenience for guests using a browser
• On-Premises—Improvements behind your firewall
• External Compatibility—GitPod, Code-Server, OpenVSCodeServer, VSCodium, Eclipse Che, Arduino IDE
• What’s Next?—Help us shape the future of CodeTogether

General Improvements

• Extreme Free Usage—“MORE FREE!” is our most common enhancement request. So we expanded anonymous free usage to unlimited 60-minute sessions with up to 4 participants.
• Shared Virtual Cursor Improvements—When switching from your own coding to watch a peer, you will immediately jump to the source without delay.
• Connections Gone Wild—In an unfortunate edge case, a handful of user systems have gone wild hammering our servers, so we fixed that to make sure our servers are always available.

VS Code/Code-OSS IDEs

• Faster Typing—When processing remote events into VS Code on a loaded system, edits could fall behind. Changes are now intelligently grouped for optimal performance.
• Fixes When Joining a Session—Fixed an odd issue when joining sessions from the command palette in VS Code clients to ensure consistent behavior.

IntelliJ/JetBrains IDEs

• Kotlin Test Support—When working with Kotlin tests, CodeTogether will now relay results run on IntelliJ hosts to remote clients.
• A/V Toolbar—Fixed an issue where the A/V toolbar in IntelliJ may not have shown causing issues using audio and video communications.

Eclipse/Eclipse IDEs

• Wild Web Developer Support—Added support for most language features exposed from Eclipse’s Wild Web Developer’s language servers including remote quick fixes.
• MyEclipse—CodeTogether is now bundled with MyEclipse 2022.1

Browser

• Browser Keyboard Navigation—You can now use Enter to navigate multiple matches when using inline search.
• Quick Open Got Fuzzy—When using quick open, the browser will now handle local fuzzy matching of results as a search is refined.

On-Premises

• OneLogin Single Sign-On—We have fixed a compatibility issue integrating with OneLogin SSO.
• IDE Dashboard—A new dashboard tab gives access to usage graphs including information on type of Host and Guest IDEs.
• TLS Security—Support for default use of TLS 1.3.
• Docker Irregular Configuration Detection—Improvements to the Docker image startup sequence to better detect and warn for irregular inputs.
• Fargate & Amazon Deployments—The Docker image has been enhanced to simplify deployment in Fargate and Amazon allowing simpler rollout in private clouds.

External Compatibility

• VSCodium—CodeTogether is fully compatible with VSCodium and can be installed from the Open-VSX Marketplace.
• GitPod—Thanks to the GitPod team (here, here, and here), CodeTogether can be used inside a GitPod environment simply by enabling the extension from the marketplace.
• Code-Server and Coder.com—Thanks to the code-server team (here) CodeTogether can be used in code-server using these steps.
• OpenVSCode Server—Thanks to the OpenVSCode Server team who collaborated with us to determine a workaround in CodeTogether to ensure it can easily be used in OpenVSCodeServer.
• Eclipse Che—Thanks to the Eclipse Che team who made an update to make CodeTogether easier to install and use. You can see that work here.
• Arduino IDE—We’re currently working with the Arduino IDE team to make CodeTogether easier to install and use. You can follow that work here.

What’s Next?

As you can see the team continues to be quite busy ensuring that CodeTogether remains the premier IDE live share solution for all the tools you already love. Please take a look at our Issue Tracker and vote for issues you believe will make a big difference to your CodeTogether experience, and feel free to create new feature requests as well.

Photo by Phinehas Adams on Unsplash