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Open source collaborative text editors

juretriglav.si

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Re: Open source collaborative text editors

#141

Post by nateps »

houshuang wrote: post #59

Surprised the author didn't mention Quill.js, which works really well with ShareDB, and is fully open source. We've been doing a lot of fun stuff with it - here's a talk I gave recently as a job talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN37rJRmISQ . (It worked, I got hired :)). As a side project, I'm working on a ShareDB backed wiki, where we can use rich text for editing pages, but also other components, like spreadshe…

Thanks for the shoutout! We are actively developing on ShareDB (https://github.com/share/sharedb) and if anyone is really interested in this, please reach out to me (https://github.com/nateps). Also, Lever is looking to hire someone to work full time on our internal + open source frameworks including ShareDB.

Re: Open source collaborative text editors

#142

Post by nateps »

houshuang wrote: post #75

One neat thing about live collaboration is that every single edit is stored. This enables some nice things, like seamless replay of the entire document editing history. We've been working for a while on trying to analyze edit histories, to see if we could predict which stage of editing a document is in, which writing strategy users use, how a small team is collaborating etc. (Main purpose is to support teachers using…

Hey houshuang! Thanks for mentioning this. I do think that replay and the potential to invert operations (including some operations and not others) is a very interesting feature of OT and we use it at Lever quite often. It is incredibly useful when doing enterprise customer support in addition to something that you can build user-facing features around.

Re: Open source collaborative text editors

#144

Post by lewisjoe »

baddox wrote: post #119
lewisjoe wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where differential synchronization shines (basically git). While OT/CRDT are really good for syncing small edits, they suck at being eventually consistent (with intentions preserved) on very large edits. We make a powerful collaborative word processor for the browser (Zoho Writer https://writer.zoho.com ) with complete offline support. This is one problem we'd like to solve in the long term. One way to solve…

I work with a tool that provides diffing and merging for rich text (effectively a limited subset of HTML). It doesn’t have or need real-time collaborative functionality at all. I have read all the papers that I can find and understand, but I’m still not happy with our merging algorithm for rich text. The issue is less about which fancy algorithm/data structure to use and more about even defining in human terms what w…

> The issue is less about which fancy algorithm/data structure to use and more about even defining in human terms what would be expected in certain merge conflicts

Exactly. When it comes to rich text editing which can have semantic trees (e.g tables and tables within tables), merge conflicts are so tough to handle.

Consider this: one version deleting a column in a table, and the other version splitting the column and adding a new row - by this time it's sort of impossible to find a meaningful representation of the table without manual intervention.

Re: Open source collaborative text editors

#145

Post by bikeshaving »

mkl wrote: post #77
AnthonBerg wrote: post #63

I found this recent paper highly enlightening: “Real Differences between OT and CRDT for Co-Editors” – Chengzheng Sun, David Sun, Agustina, Weiwei Cai, October 2018. Arxiv meta: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.02137 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.02137.pdf It’s well written imo. The conclusions chapter is very good. “In this work, we have critically reviewed and evaluated representative OT and CRDT solutions, with respec…

Do you have any idea which would be better for a vector based drawing app? The data is mostly strokes (lists of points), and individual strokes generally don't change.

Figma has a blog post about the algorithm they use for their collaborative editing features but no open source code as far as I can tell.

https://www.figma.com/blog/realtime-editing-of-ordered-seque...

Re: Open source collaborative text editors

#147

Post by oefrha »

nateps wrote: post #141
houshuang wrote: post #59

Surprised the author didn't mention Quill.js, which works really well with ShareDB, and is fully open source. We've been doing a lot of fun stuff with it - here's a talk I gave recently as a job talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN37rJRmISQ . (It worked, I got hired :)). As a side project, I'm working on a ShareDB backed wiki, where we can use rich text for editing pages, but also other components, like spreadshe…

Thanks for the shoutout! We are actively developing on ShareDB ( https://github.com/share/sharedb ) and if anyone is really interested in this, please reach out to me ( https://github.com/nateps ). Also, Lever is looking to hire someone to work full time on our internal + open source frameworks including ShareDB.

Thanks for ShareDB! Funny thing, I was looking for a self-hosted real-time collaborative editor myself just a week ago, and landed exactly on Quill.js backed by ShareDB. (I also considered SharedDB-backed Monaco, but it doesn’t seem to support OT out of the box, whereas Quill is literally plug and play. Of course one can write a translation layer between Monaco’s change events and OT.)

Re: Open source collaborative text editors

#150

Post by alalonde »

pmontra wrote: post #34
alalonde wrote: post #13

Indeed, the space is growing quickly. I run a company that provides a backend for real-time collaboration, so we necessarily stay on top of what's out there. There's a reason the server-side tech tends be paid: it is extraordinarily difficult to provide guaranteed eventual consistency of data at low latency. The CKEditor guys (and us, for that matter) have put YEARS of development effort into their solutions. We're w…

Are you working only with editors running inside web browsers or also native ones? What I would like to have is something that bridges two native editors, let's say emacs and VS Code, and let's a team share the editor (whatever each developer's preferred editor is) and not only the screen on Slack or similar. That would be great for remote pair programming. I guess there would be a protocol for selecting the buffer/t…

There has been a proliferation of realtime collaboration within code editors because the underlying data model (a string!) is so simple. As you mentioned, you would need to define a sufficient protocol encapsulating the common functionality between code editors along with defining which aspects would be shared and broadcasted vs kept private (e.g. an independent vs "follow" mode).

The data model could easily be defined in Convergence. Implementation-wise, the primary limitation would be that at the moment we only offer a javascript/typescript client. I haven't explored the VSCode base but I know it was written in TS and provided as a "native app". We do have an example of Convergence running in node.js (NWJS).

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