DevStructure is about making the development process better, not different. Everyone has their favorite editor or IDE and a comfortable workflow centered around it that makes them happiest. We want to make DevStructure fit naturally into every workflow, bringing configuration management along for the ride.

To that end, we've evaluated many of the market's solutions for remotely editing source code and found ourselves wanting something more.

The class of software we'll call remote editors generally suffers from performance problems. Because all filesystem operations incur a network round-trip, operations like searching your entire project or browsing the entire directory tree are too slow to be used frequently. This category includes editors like BBEdit, Sublime Text, and gedit plus software like Expandrive, Transmit, and SSHFS.

Software like Dropbox performs more favorably because it sychronizes a local copy of your files with the remote copy by way of their service. It's fast and reliable but, like many of the best software above, doesn't always come free.

The choice of workflow and software you use alongside DevStructure will always be yours and today we're adding a new choice in the form of a free, open-source file syncing utility called Doubledown for Mac OS X 10.5 and newer.

Download Doubledown 0.0.1 0.0.2 for Mac OS X 10.5 and newer

Doubledown keeps a complete local copy of the remote directory you're syncing so all your local operations are lightning fast. After it performs an initial sync (being careful not to clobber any local changes), Doubledown is notified of changes by Mac OS X's FSEvents framework and responds by creating, uploading, and removing files or directories as required.

Check out doubledown(1) and the source code on GitHub.