Gobby is a collaborative editor whose GTK stack asks a lot of the system

What a collaborative editor actually has to coordinate

Gobby is a free collaborative editor, which the project description unpacks as the possibility to edit files simultaneously with other users over a network. The platforms on which you could use it are Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and other Unix like ones, and it is developed with the GTK+ toolkit, which the documentation says integrates nicely into the GNOME desktop environment.

The feature list is where the design of this kind of software shows. Realtime collaboration through encrypted connections, including PFS, and each user has its own colour so others can identify them. Local group undo, so a mistake is undone for the group rather than for one person. Group chat. It shows cursors and selections of remote users, and there is a sidebar with all the others having joined the session.

Then the editor basics: syntax highlighting, auto indentation and configurable tab width, multiple documents in one session, Unicode support and internationalisation.

The two items that separate a real collaborative editor from a shared file is the cursor display and the group undo. Showing remote cursors is what makes simultaneous editing legible, and group undo is the feature that determines whether a session is usable, because in a shared session one person's undo has to mean something to everyone else.

The infrastructure side is a highly configurable dedicated server with sophisticated access control lists, and optional Zeroconf support for discovering sessions on the network.

libinfinity does the networking, and it constrains everything else

The requirements list is the most important part of the documentation for anyone considering Gobby today, and it starts with libinfinity 0.7.x.

Everything else follows from that. Glib 2.40.0 or later and Glibmm 2.40.0 or later, libxml++ 2.6.0 or later, libgsasl 0.2.21 or later, Gtkmm-3.0 3.6 or later, and GtkSourceView-3.0 3.0 or later.

libinfinity is the foundation library, and it is what provides the encrypted connections, the document synchronisation, the user sessions and the access control lists. The dedicated server is a libinfinity application, and the client is a GTK+ front end on top of it. That architecture is why the feature list reads as it does: a user colour, a cursor, an undo operation and a chat message are all libinfinity concepts surfaced in the client.

It also explains the age. The requirement versions are from the middle of the 2010s, and the project has been through at least one major dependency generation change, since the tree still contains a gobby-0.5.1 directory and a gobby-0.5.desktop.in file while the current release is Gobby 0.6.

For an adopter, the practical question is whether your distribution still ships libinfinity 0.7.x and the GTK 3 stack. On a current Linux desktop that is plausible but no longer the default, and the documentation does not list a newer libinfinity as supported.

Building from source is the documented route

The project page is short, and the development section is the most operational part of it.

To get in contact with the developers, use the obby-users mailing list or open an issue on GitHub. To get the up to date Gobby code to hack on, the documentation gives the clone command `git clone https://github.com/gobby/gobby.git` and nothing else, so there is no install script or package index step in the documentation at all.

Pull requests against the GitHub repository are appreciated, and the primary distribution point is the releases page on the same host.

The tree shows a Meson build, with meson.build and meson_options.txt at the root, and an m4/ directory which is the older autotools scaffolding, so the project has been through a build system migration as well. The code lives in code/, the help documentation in help/, the translations in po/ with an update-potfiles script, the icons in icons/, and win32/ holds the Windows specific pieces.

Two files in the root are worth a mention. de.0x539.gobby.gschema.xml.in is a GSettings schema template, which is how the GNOME settings for the application are declared, and gobby-0.5.metainfo.xml.in is the AppStream metadata template for software centres.

There is also a ChangeLog.manual alongside ChangeLog.pre-0.5, and a NEWS file, so the project's own history is in the tree rather than only in release notes.

A server model means access control is a real part of the product

The description of Gobby as a collaborative editor hides an important architectural decision, which the feature list makes visible: there is a highly configurable dedicated server, and it carries sophisticated access control lists.

That is a different deployment model from a peer to peer editor that discovers peers on the network. Zeroconf support is listed as optional, which means the easy path exists, but the recommended path for a team is to run a server, point the clients at it, and manage who may connect and what they may do through the ACLs.

The consequence is operational. A shared editing session with an ACL system is a service, and a service needs a host, a configuration, and a decision about whether it lives on your network or on the internet. The documentation does not describe the server configuration format or the default ACL semantics, so those details have to come from the wiki and the server's own manual.

The mailing list split reflects this. obby-announce is a moderated list used to announce new releases of Gobby and of its foundation, libinfinity, and obby-users is for discussions about usage and installation problems, with the announcements posted there too.

The project is asking for three kinds of help

The how to get involved section is unusually candid about what the project needs, and it is a decent signal of the project's state.

It says it urgently seeks all kinds of people who could help in any way. First it needs documentation writers, to help craft a help file and some standalone documentation for the web. Second, if you are skilled in C and C++ programming, help is needed with programming, and a starting point is the GitHub issues. Third, and last but certainly not least, it needs translators to get their hands at Gobby's string templates so it can be localised.

That list is a project telling you which of its own parts are thin. The documentation is thin, and the request for documentation writers is a request for the same thing the README already shows, since this README is a synopsis with a feature list and a dependency list rather than a manual. The help/ directory in the tree and the wiki are where the real content lives.

The translation angle is a fair signal too. Internationalisation is listed as a feature, and a project asking for translators to localise string templates is a project whose user base is expected to be non English, which is a reasonable expectation for a collaborative editor on Unix like desktops.

There is also a TODO file at the root of the repository, and a AUTHORS file, which is what a long lived project keeps around.

The licence is ISC, and the copyright line is old

Gobby is free software licensed under the terms of the ISC license, and the licence text is included in the repository as COPYING.

The copyright notice reads Copyright (C) 2008-2015, Armin Burgmeier, followed by the standard ISC permission grant: use, copy, modify and distribute for any purpose with or without fee, provided the copyright notice and the permission notice appear in all copies, with the usual disclaimer of warranties and limitation of liability.

ISC is a short permissive licence, which makes Gobby easy to embed in a larger product or to ship alongside commercial tooling. There is no copyleft obligation and no network use clause, so there is nothing unusual to think about when you distribute it.

The copyright year range ending in 2015 is worth noticing, because it tells you the licence text has not been touched in a long time. That is a normal thing for a stable licence, but it does line up with the release history: the listed versions are Gobby 0.6 from 2021-01-31, v0.4.11 from 2020-11-25 and v0.4.10 from the same day.

The repository is not archived, and the last push was on 2026-05-02. So there has been recent activity in the tree without a new release tag, which usually means work is landing on master but the packaging step has not run.

Where Gobby sits against a browser based editor

The comparison that matters is with the collaborative editing you already get from a browser document, and the difference in approach is fundamental.

A browser editor keeps the document in a service. The service owns the file, the session and the access control, the clients are stateless views, and the network is a requirement rather than a choice. Gobby inverts that: the file lives on the machine of whoever opened it, the server coordinates the edits, and the client is a native GTK application with a real editor widget underneath it.

What that buys is the editor itself. Syntax highlighting, auto indentation and configurable tab width come from GtkSourceView, a mature source editor component, and a group undo across users is a property of the libinfinity session model rather than something bolted onto a web editor. The cost is everything that comes with a desktop application on an old stack: the dependency list above, a native install on every participant's machine, and a server to run if you want access control.

The sensible way to read Gobby is as a project of the libinfinity era. The library is the real product, Gobby is its flagship client, and the documentation's own framing, that the project needs documentation writers and translators, matches a codebase whose user base is small and loyal rather than large and growing.

If your team needs shared editing of code today with no servers to run and no clients to install, this is the wrong shape of tool, and the effort is better spent on a hosted service. If you need a self hosted server with real ACLs and a native editor on each machine, Gobby is a working implementation of exactly that, provided you can still get libinfinity 0.7.x and GtkSourceView 3 on your distribution.

Editorial conclusion

Gobby fits a group that wants a shared, self hosted editing session with a server in the middle and access control over who joins, and that is comfortable with a GTK and libinfinity stack. It does not fit a browser based workflow, and it does not fit a team that wants a project with a current release, since the last listed release is v0.6.0 from 2021-01-31 and the last push was on 2026-05-02. Before adopting it, check that your distribution still packages libinfinity 0.7.x, Glib and Glibmm 2.40 or later, libxml++ 2.6 or later, libgsasl 0.2.21 or later, Gtkmm-3.0 3.6 or later and GtkSourceView-3.0 3.0 or later, and decide whether the dedicated server model is what you want before you commit to deploying one.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. gobby/gobby on GitHub
2. License: ISC
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases