Writing Together

The primary editing experience for Yarn Spinner is our Yarn Spinner for Visual Studio Code extension. This provides the majority of features that you'd want in order to effectively write .yarn scripts using VSCode.

This guide shows you how to use Microsoft's free Live Share extension for Visual Studio Code, together with Yarn Spinner for Visual Studio Code, to collaborate live on your narrative.

Installing Live Share

To install Live Share for Visual Studio Code, and use it with Yarn Spinner:

1. Setup Yarn Spinner for Visual Studio Code.

2. Click this link to open Visual Studio Code, and jump to the Live Share Extension.

3. Click the install button!

Inviting collaborators

Open your Yarn Spinner project in Visual Studio code. For example, here's I Feel Fine:

With your project open, choose Live Share in the Activity Bar on the left side of the screen, and in the resulting view that appears, choose the Share button:

You'll be prompted to sign in to either GitHub or your Microsoft account, and after this a notification will appear in the bottom of the screen letting you know a shareable link to collaborate has been copied to the clipboard:

Joining a shared workspace

When you receive a collaboration link and visit it, you'll be asked how you'd like to join:

If you choose to Continue in Web, you'll be taken to a web version of VS Code, which will not have the Yarn Spinner extension installed. If you click Open in Visual Studio Code, your local copy of VS Code will be installed, complete with extensions.

Once the shared workspace opens in your local copy of VS Code, you'll be in an untrusted state, which means the Yarn Spinner extension will not be providing syntax highlighting, To enable this, click Manage, in the grey bar at the top of the window, then click the Trust button in the view that appears:

Writing together

The person who initially shared the workspace will have full and complete access to the features of the Yarn Spinner for Visual Studio Code extension. Everything, from syntax highlighting to the graph view will work as normal.

Those who are joining the shared session will only have access to the syntax highlighting features of the Yarn Spinner for Visual Studio Code extension, provided they go through the process of trusting the workspace, as noted earlier.

As you edit, you'll be able to see other users in the files, and their work will be briefly highlighted as they write:

For more help

For more guidance using the Live Share extension, check out the extension's official page, as well as the Live Share extension's documentation.