Significance

"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools", right? Exactly right. When you're not next to each other, it's impossible to have interactions without tools. Tools have affordances. Affordances influence behavior - you will do more of what is easy in your tool. Whatever your preferred style of work is, if you're remote, you need the best possible tools to support it.

"That which does for you, also does to you."
--Gene Hughson, The Iron Law of Tools

Best-case outcome? You pair smoothly, effectively, and joyfully.

Worst-case outcome? You need a new job. --schmonz

Tool smells

if hard to drive, and you want to...

Selection Criteria

Self-hosted or internet service?
Data lives on own machine or has to be uploaded/synced?
Allows everyone to drive, or only the host?
Only two people or a mob?
Full-screen or terminal-only (or something in between)?
Includes audio?
Includes text chat?
Does your company already have this? Do they mandate this?
Same platform or mixed OSes?

Tools

Tool	Hosting	Data	Driver	Participants	Screen	Voice	Text	Platforms	Cost
AnyDesk	hosted	local	all	mob	full			Mac,Windows,Linux,iOS,Android	free,paid
appear.in
Chrome Remote Desktop	hosted	local	both	2	full			Google Chrome	free
Floobits	hosted	hosted	both	2	editor	Hangouts	Hangouts	Emacs,Neovim,IntelliJ	free,paid
Jitsi Meet	hosted	local	host only	mob	full			Any browser with WebRTC	free
jitsi
join.me
Koding
screen
~~Screenhero~~	hosted	local	both	2	full			Mac,Windows	Slack killed this product in 2019
Scrimba	hosted	?	both	?	web IDE		?	web	?
TeamViewer
Teletype for Atom
tmux	local	local	all	mob	terminal			Anything with SSH	free
tuple
USE Together	hosted,on-premise	local
Visual Studio Live Share
VNC
VSee
zoom.us

Additional notes:

Screenhero: Two mouse cursors! Requires high bandwidth, low latency. Trivial setup. Traverses firewalls pretty well. Recovers well from VPN and proxy changes. Maybe a bit smoother if the primary driver for the session initiates the call. Definitely smoother experience with similar screen resolutions and OS platforms (think Windows/Command keys).

LiveShare: VS Code and Visual Studio only, low bandwidth needs (not screen-sharing). Very limited guest coder experience. Up to 30 people.

Floobits: Requires code to be synced to a Floobits server. Shares just the editor window, so it might be very efficient with bandwidth. Since both parties have the same code, each can run tests locally.

Scrimba: currently client-side web stuff only.

SIP/SRTP/ZRTP

for voice

OS X Messages

schmonz refuses to do family tech support any other way. Don't bother describing it to me, show me
Then I can drive
When trying this with a coworker over Jabber (Google's), accepting a share-screen request never got back to the inviter
voice, video, screen-sharing (maybe not guest-driving though?)

tmate.io

Terminal-only
can host your own server

Synergy ?

Slack

text chat
audio

Mumble

text chat
audio

Skype

text chat
audio
host-only screen sharing (no guest driving)

WebEx

text chat
audio
screen share (request control to interact with host's computer?)

GoToMeeting

LinPhone

for audio

Jitsi

audio
screensharing?

Editors Only (not screen share)

Wemux (group tmux / mobbing)

Online IDEs and editors

Other Tools

Collaboration Superpowers list
Miro (formerly RealtimeBoard)

Experience Reports

Code Craftsman Saturdays - October 2013

We did a full day workshop where we experimented with different remote pairing tools and techniques. The single most valuable takeaway was to experiment with the tools you think you want to use locally before trying doing it remotely. This shortens the try-fail loop and frustration associated with a low bandwidth experiment.

Also, always have a fall-back communication channel pre-agreed to; e.g. exchange cell phone numbers. Few things are more frustrating and wasteful than trying various communications channels not knowing the extent of a problem when someone drops off suddenly.

--totherBob