Pair programming is an essential technique for us, and—given that we’re seeing more and more teams whose members are distributed across multiple locations—we have experimented with a number of tools to support remote pairing. We certainly liked ScreenHero but are concerned about its future. For teams that don’t rely on a graphical IDE, using tmate for pairing has turned out to be a great solution. tmate is a fork of the popular tmux tool, and compared to tmux for remote pairing, the setup is much easier. Compared to graphical screen-sharing solutions, the bandwidth and resource requirements are modest, and it obviously never suffers from blurry screens. Teams can also set up their own server, thus retaining full control of the privacy and integrity of the solution.
