What are the best tools for remote pair programming?

As someone who has remote pair programmed around 100 hours in a few months, the main key was already mentioned: the editor. It takes far less bandwidth to transfer characters instead of screen shots or even streaming encoded screenshots.  Therefore, if possible using the terminal is a great way to go.  On my mac book pro, I setup a "pairing" user.  I setup the same thing on my Linode.  I have my pairing partner reverse tunnel via my linode.  There are probably easier ways to reach my box than that but I like the control it provides. We are both VIM power users and so it's easy for us to be productive in the same editor.  Of course, things can be difficult if you use a graphical editor like Textmate.  But then again, why would you use anything BUT vim (just sayin'). Tmux is the way to go if going in via a terminal for a couple of reasons: - You can have multiple windows or split windows.  That way we will have our editor in one window, and our tests running in the other.  Remember, this is done in a single terminal window. - The tmux screen automatically sized to the dimensions of the smallest screen.  Really great feature. For audio/video we moved to Google Hangout once it got more stable (spring 2012 or so).  Skype was good but it just seems to have worse quality/stability. I highly recommend remote pairing if you can.  It's fantastic if you have the right partner.

https://floobits.com/ gives you really good https://floobits.com/ tools. Edit the same document in your editor of choice: Web Editor, Sublime, Emacs, Intelli-J, Vim. Also has real time Video Conferencing.

We pair programmed remotely for months using TeamViewer (http://www.teamviewer.com/). Also: Skype has screen sharing built in nowadays, if I remember correctly, but I have not tried it out.

We use pair programming as part of our recruitment process and pretty often do it remotely. We love to use: http://www.google.com/intl/pl/+/learnmore/hangouts/ (which has now new desktop sharing feature enabled) or if our candidate owns a mac - http://screenhero.com/. If you're more interested in the actual flow - take a peek at https://netguru.co/blog/posts/how-pair-programming-can-help-you-in-recruitment. EDIT: we've just featured our full pair programming configuration at: https://netguru.co/blog/what-s-a-pair-to-do-pair. Feel free to make use of it as well!

Joe Moore has a nice blog on the subject at http://remotepairprogramming.com.  There are also a lot of great resources at http://www.pairprogramwith.me/. I'm currently working on a tool called http://madeye.io to make remote pairing more natural.  MadEye is a web-based editor that allows simulataneous editing of source code a la Google Docs.  MadEye sessions can be embedded inside of a Google Hangout for video chat.  Running one command in your project starts a session and keeps your file system in sync with the web editor.

As of 2016, my company is hiring a remote worker to pair-program with me, so I tested Chrome Remote Desktop Extension: http://chrome.google.com/remotedesktopI only tested it locally (between two computers in the same physical environment), but I'm impressed with the results. Latency seems to be very low, and screen quality is great.I plan to use it combined with Hangouts (instead of TeamViewer and/or Skype), since it is more "native" to us here, who are already users of Google Drive for sharing work-related material.

Some of the best pair programming experiences I've had, have been remotely. You get your own space and time to research around the subject. We used http://join.me and Skype. Skype has clear audio but doesn't have the video quality for sharing the screen. http://Join.me allows you to request to edit on the other person's screen. We also played around with sharing the code in Dropbox.

SSH and GNU Screen or tmux maybe? See http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/2166174647/love-hate-tmux and http://blog.voxdolo.me/remote-pairing-with-vim-and-tmux.html

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