14 ms·

Open source collaborative text editors

628 points by juretriglav 7y ago

therobot24 7y ago
i feel like overleaf/sharelatex should be somewhere in this article
- juretriglav 7y ago
  I know the folks at Overleaf and they're awesome! However, their editor is not open source. But yes, ShareLaTex probably needs a spot on there, though I haven't looked at it in a long while and it seems to be pretty dormant in terms of development: https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex/graphs/contributors https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex/graphs/contributors Had no idea it had real-time collaboration... Wonder how it's done. Digging in now... :) If you're using it, it would be great to get your thoughts on it and what particular things you like about it. Update: ShareLaTeX uses a string-based collaboration algorithm (i.e. LaTeX is plain text, not a structured document format), and seems to be limited to max 2 collaborators (though that could be old info), so that explains why it didn't appear on my radar. I'll take it for a spin anyway, thanks!
  - williamstein 7y ago
    "seems to be pretty dormant in terms of development" -- that's because Overleaf purchased ShareLaTeX. https://www.overleaf.com/blog/518-exciting-news-sharelatex-is-joining-overleaf https://www.overleaf.com/blog/518-exciting-news-sharelatex-i... Also, you might be unaware of CoCalc, which is open source https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc. CoCalc supports collaborative editing of many structured documents, including Jupyter notebooks, but not rich text at present.
    - jdleesmiller 7y ago
      Hello, cofounder of Overleaf here. Just to be clear, open source development of ShareLaTeX is ongoing and indeed has accelerated since Overleaf and ShareLaTeX joined forces. ShareLaTeX is split into many repos, and the one linked above is a 'coordinator' repo that doesn't get updated much. See https://github.com/sharelatex/web-sharelatex https://github.com/sharelatex/web-sharelatex for one that is more active. The free version of Overleaf/ShareLaTeX does have a restriction on the number of collaborators: you plus one other. Paid accounts support more collaborators [1], and you can also get more collaborators on the free account by referring others [2]. [1] https://www.overleaf.com/user/subscription/plans https://www.overleaf.com/user/subscription/plans [2] https://www.overleaf.com/user/bonus https://www.overleaf.com/user/bonus (requires an account)
Iv 7y ago
I love your description of "the dive". I am happy to see I am not the only one experiencing these recurring devouring interests that bring me much much deeper than I would like to go until I am starting to fork a github repo at 2am wondering "what the hell am I doing?" And that article is tangentially related to a recurring interest of mine (shared editable 3d universe in which you can code collaboratively). If you happened to have an article comparing the merit of several server architectures/algorithms for collaborative text edition, I think many things can be related. I am now reading about CRDT (What the hell am I doing?) and that's something I may use to edit a scene graph collaboratively!
- juretriglav 7y ago
  Hey thanks for that. :) Diving is super fun but also exceptionally exhausting. But often it's impossible to 'load' a complex problem in your head if you don't dive in for hours. Would be nice if there was a less stressful way. In terms of editable 3d universes (whoah!), have you considered chucking together Three.js's JSON scene description (https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/wiki/JSON-Object-Scene-format-4 https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/wiki/JSON-Object-Scene-fo...) with https://github.com/automerge/automerge https://github.com/automerge/automerge, a CRDT for JSON? What could possibly go wrong?!
  - ilaksh 7y ago
    ShareJS has a JSON editor example https://github.com/josephg/ShareJS/tree/master/examples/public https://github.com/josephg/ShareJS/tree/master/examples/publ...
    - Iv 7y ago
      Thanks! But a big part of my obsession is to be able to modify a 3d universe from within. I won't claim it is practical or a good idea in any way, just an obsessive thing I want to try.
      - ilaksh 7y ago
        Right I understood that. I was replying to the other guy who suggested putting the scene in a JSON Three.js thing. So the idea was that the thing I suggested was just a possibly easy way to get a collaborative JSON editor into your program.
im_down_w_otp 7y ago
I would be very appreciative if Google made a stripped down version of Google Docs for plaintext editing. There are a bunch of basic integration features that would also be fantastic, but if the product was literally just Google Docs, minus the WYSIWYG bits, and all plaintext w/ maybe some syntax highlighting thrown in, I'd be super happy.
- choward 7y ago
  > Google Docs, minus the WYSIWYG bits, and all plaintext w/ maybe some syntax highlighting thrown in And the feature creep begins. Eventually you'll be asking for a full blown IDE.
  - ma2rten 7y ago
    Google has actually already has an internal cloud-based IDE.
    - londons_explore 7y ago
      Which doesn't do real-time collaboration, and due to the way it's backing store works, likely never will.
- jraph 7y ago
  This looks like etherpad https://etherpad.org/ https://etherpad.org/ Not plain text only but probably can be configured for that. No syntax highlighting.
- twblalock 7y ago
  > Google Docs, minus the WYSIWYG bits, and all plaintext w/ maybe some syntax highlighting thrown in That is the subset of features you want. Everyone else wants a slightly different subset of features. Add all of those subsets together and you end up with the total feature set of Google Docs.
- houshuang 7y ago
  That's basically what I'm trying to build - we're starting with Quill.js and ShareDB, adding extensions, configuring, and then adding a plugin system based on React, which can take arbitrary components all based on ShareDB sync (think spreadsheets, forms, but I'd also love to integrate the Pyiodide stuff to have runnable Python code inside a rich text document, etc). We built this as part of a synchronous collaborative learning platform, but I'm currently trying to extract the key components so that it can be a stand-alone open source library that others can help build on. Very early prototype: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@chilifrog/reactive-rich-text https://www.npmjs.com/package/@chilifrog/reactive-rich-text
alceta 7y ago
We went with CKEditor5 with a commonmark backend and I cannot recommend it more highly. commonmark data is converted upon initially opening and when closing the editor, allowing all native functionality to happen efficiently. However I do note that we do not yet have a production ready backend for collaborative editing. I would suggest to use their service if possible, since we're developing an open source product it would not be an option for us. There is a quite leaning curve when implementing new plugins due to the strict separation of model and data (commonmark in our case) and user-facing views.
- juretriglav 7y ago
  CKEditor 5 looks amazing (from tech to docs), but that lack of an available backend is a bummer. Do you know if there's anything out there that would work as an initial/hacky/example backend? How do you plan to tackle this?
ilaksh 7y ago
Etherpad (etherpad lite) has plugins for formatting https://static.etherpad.org/plugins.html https://static.etherpad.org/plugins.html You can try a lot of them out in the demo online https://etherpad.org/ https://etherpad.org/
nullc 7y ago
Emacs can connect to multiple screens.
- jsilence 7y ago
  Pointers?
  - dima55 7y ago
    Run and emacs server, and multiple simultaneous connections into it.
- jcagalawan 7y ago
  Is there a setup that lets multiple people edit at the same time?
  - nullc 7y ago
    Yes. It's not the sort of thing you'd use with untrusted parties over the internet since it requires access to the remote x-server, but it totally works for collaborative editing (esp with people sitting in the same room): https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Multiple-Displays.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mu...
- ginko 7y ago
  Couldn't you also just setup an emacs server that listens over a TCP socket? https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/TCP-Emacs-server.html#TCP-Emacs-server https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/TC...
alalonde 7y ago
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 working on both offline mode and a generic rich-text data model with support for the major editors. If anyone's interested, I'd happily do some Q and A here.
- blotter_paper 7y ago
  I appreciate that you mentioned a competitor without shamelessly plugging your own product, but out of curiosity, and if you don't mind sharing, what editor do you work on?
  - alalonde 7y ago
    You can currently already do good-enough-for-most DOM-level synchronization using any editor, of which we have a few examples. A lot of the examples of RTC out there (apps using TogetherJS for instance) are doing this already. For rich text, we'd like to be able to provide 100% support for a particular editor's capabilities, which necessitates a deeper, custom data model. One of our value propositions is a unified backend for dealing with any JSON data (and eventually beyond), avoiding binding server-side code to a particular choice of UI component.
    - houshuang 7y ago
      I am curious about this argument - I think CKEditor 5 made a similar one in this epic blog post about how they implemented real-time collaboration (https://ckeditor.com/blog/Lessons-learned-from-creating-a-rich-text-editor-with-real-time-collaboration/ https://ckeditor.com/blog/Lessons-learned-from-creating-a-ri...). We're using Quill.js with ShareDB, which supports JSON structures (which is great, because for us we often have documents with several rich text fields, and other complex structures). So far we've been able to do anything we wanted with Quill, and I've never felt limited by the data structures we have available... (We also do all kinds of other stuff with ShareDB JSON). I guess one reason you could need custom types would be to ensure consistency - if two keys depend on each other, and one user sets one key, and the other user sets another key, and the document is now invalid, you'd need the engine to be able to reconcile at a higher level?
jsilence 7y ago
What about Cryptpad? https://cryptpad.fr/ https://cryptpad.fr/
- ilaksh 7y ago
  Its full copyleft AGPL which could be an issue for someone trying to use it in a commercial application. But for other uses, it looks absolutely incredible. https://github.com/xwiki-labs/cryptpad https://github.com/xwiki-labs/cryptpad
  - cobbzilla 7y ago
    From the Cryptpad README, gotta love the humor: The server does have a certain power, it can send you evil javascript which does the wrong thing (leaks the key or the data back to the server or to someone else). This is however an active attack which makes it detectable. The NSA really hates doing these because they might get caught and laughed at and humiliated in front of the whole world (again). If you're making the NSA mad enough for them to use an active attack against you, Great Success Highfive, now take the battery out of your computer before it spawns Agent Smith.
- oefrha 7y ago
  I used (a self-hosted instance of) CryptPad for a while earlier this year, but unfortunately the editor is borderline unusable in iOS Safari.
jimbo1qaz 7y ago
HackMD is a decent online Markdown editor.
hyperion2010 7y ago
All I want is org mode backed by a crdt or similar so I don't have to convert in and out every time I need to collaborate with someone.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mochidusk 7y ago
I was able to get real-time collaborative text editing to work on one of my side projects by combining quill.js[1], ot.js[2], and firebase[3]. This was a few years ago when there weren't any fully open-source options. I'm in the process of switching out firebase for an elixir/phoenix backend[4]. I'm really glad for this article because it captures the exact feelings that I have. [1] https://quilljs.com/ https://quilljs.com/ [2] https://github.com/Operational-Transformation/ot.js/ https://github.com/Operational-Transformation/ot.js/ [3] https://firebase.google.com/ https://firebase.google.com/ [4] https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix
- ilaksh 7y ago
  That looks like a really cool project but.. there weren't any fully open source options? The original Etherpad came out 10 years ago. Etherpad Lite has been out for several years also and has had formatting plugins for quite awhile.
  - mochidusk 7y ago
    You're right, I completely forgot about Etherpad. But I don't consider Etherpad the same as Quilljs or ProseMirror. Etherpad is something you host (an app itself) while the other text editors are something you can build upon/integrate into your app. I didn't want to host an instance of Etherpad, I needed a library. I wanted an editing experience similar to Medium.com text editor: consistent, well-formed html output and formatting. At the time, Quilljs was one of the best open-source editor that produced consistent output regardless of the browser. Also I didn't want to store html, I wanted to store operations in the database. I have an app similar to Figma[1] (basically real-time Sketch) and I needed just the real-time text editing feature. [1] https://www.figma.com/ https://www.figma.com/
- houshuang 7y ago
  tmbb has been doing work on writing a ShareDB compatible backend in Elixir (https://elixirforum.com/t/realtime-collaboration/9736/5 https://elixirforum.com/t/realtime-collaboration/9736/5), this has long been a dream of mine. If not, having a separate Node server that just deals with ShareDB documents would also be feasible - all the app logic could still be in Elixir. Happy to share stuff we've been doing with Quill, for example my company recently sponsored work on shared cursors/presence for Quill.
Philipp0205 7y ago
Is there a way to use one of them without hosting it yourself?
- ilaksh 7y ago
  Yes see etherpad.org
  - Philipp0205 7y ago
    Ty!
- tjmehta 7y ago
  Also check out https://codeshare.io https://codeshare.io
  - Philipp0205 7y ago
    Ty!
willvarfar 7y ago
So, lots of open-source UIs that use closed-source servers for collaborative editing? This figures. This is one of the ways 'open source' companies can make money. So, the author sets about making an open-source collaboration server that inter-operates with the existing open-source editor? Kudos! But now the company can retaliate by adding features or inconsistencies to the closed source server and its integration into the UI, making the open-source server forever out-of-date and playing catch-up. Ouch.
mushufasa 7y ago
The author didn't mention TinyMCE. Was that on purpose? Is it not good?
- jldugger 7y ago
  Does it support real time collaborative editing?
c0g 7y ago
Any whiteboard products? Collaborative drawing would make remote work lovely.
- phillc73 7y ago
  I've just found that Cryptpad offers a whiteboard feature.[1] I know nothing more about them and was just checking them out after seeing the comment in this thread. [1] https://cryptpad.fr/whiteboard/ https://cryptpad.fr/whiteboard/
threespice 7y ago
This was one of the project idea I made myself work on during this April. The motivation being, "how hard is it to make a real-time code editor". Long story short, it is far more complicated than I had imagine and to complete in less than a week. Implementing the CRDT itself, the logic itself is challenging and than putting it down to code is another story. From my understanding, an implementation of logoot[1] is built to create the skeleton of a collaborative environment. From there on, you have the building block to make other things work with it, such as collaborative canvas. I built one using Socket.io on Angular and used Ace Editor own implementation of CRDT > https://github.com/abdusamed91/realtime-codeeditor https://github.com/abdusamed91/realtime-codeeditor I used the following references to build it 1) https://alligator.io/angular/socket-io/ https://alligator.io/angular/socket-io/ 2) https://medium.com/@ofir3322/create-an-online-ide-with-angular-6-nodejs-part-1-163a939a7929 https://medium.com/@ofir3322/create-an-online-ide-with-angul... To get started with the theory CRDT low level algorithm, these two post go into great details 1) https://conclave-team.github.io/conclave-site/ https://conclave-team.github.io/conclave-site/ 2) http://digitalfreepen.com/2017/10/06/simple-real-time- http://digitalfreepen.com/2017/10/06/simple-real-time- collaborative-text-editor.html [1]https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00432368/document https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00432368/document I'd love to take it to another level if anyone here has mutual interest in this field of work.
Fnoord 7y ago
tmux + vim (akin to Windows Remote Assistance) can be good enough in some situations.
- arendtio 7y ago
  Not really. I use tmux + vim on a daily basis, but it starts with having just one cursor. Goes on with not being web-based and in the end, it has no offline collaboration support (that requires some kind of merge strategy). So yes, there are some use-cases when it is sufficient for collaboration, but most certainly not for the use-cases described in the blog post.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    My use-case isn't similar to the ones described in the blog post. You could easily make tmux + vim web-based if you desire (I don't see why, I'd just use Mosh or SSH instead). For merging you could abstract the content to a Git repository. For multiple cursors you could try Wemux [1]. [1] https://github.com/zolrath/wemux https://github.com/zolrath/wemux
keybits 7y ago
I'm curious about the choice of PubSweet for the collaboration components. Can you summarise what functions PubSweet is performing in your example app, and are there alternatives to PubSweet that you looked at for this functionality?
- juretriglav 7y ago
  It mainly has to do with familiarity with the framework. The focus of the work was on the collaborative server bits, not learning a new framework/ecosystem and I feel very comfortable in PubSweet, being its lead dev. The project also served as an app-building exercise, as we’re just now meeting in Cambridge to focus on that aspect and reusable components within PubSweet. And when all said and done, there weren’t any friction points with this approach, it all just sort of worked, from data model migrations to React frontend, so yay :) Hope that clears it up!
mrrobotchicken 7y ago
Can't see any link to collaborative demos for CKEditor 5 in the article but here it is: https://ckeditor.com/collaboration/real-time-collaborative-editing/demo/ https://ckeditor.com/collaboration/real-time-collaborative-e...
- RobertRoberts 7y ago
  Anyone have any experience using the collaboration feature of CKEditor5 they can share?
idleherb0 7y ago
I’m new to the topic from a technical point of view. I was wondering if the conflict resolving issues are fundamentally different from online gaming scenarios. I.e., could the ways problems are solved in multiplayer games also be applied to collaborative editors and vice versa?
- unixhero 7y ago
  Good question, but it could be responded to by writing a thesis.
  - scofalik 7y ago
    We frequently joke in our company that we'd love to write a thesis on OT and get a better academical grade ;).
- arianvanp 7y ago
  The quake3 netcode is eventually consistent and always reminded me of CRDTs. https://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/network.php https://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/network.php
  - idleherb0 7y ago
    I was thinking exactly about q3a when I wrote the question!
- jlokier 7y ago
  That's a great question. One of the differences is real-time games do motion prediction, to hide latency. I haven't heard of editors doing so.
  - jkaptur 7y ago
    Arguably not an “editor”, but I think the mosh shell input does something like this.
- alalonde 7y ago
sara7262 7y ago
Who is Satan and why there is evil Best video about this with proofs https://youtu.be/AWNM1-xYI5E https://youtu.be/AWNM1-xYI5E Funny monkey using phone in video Don't think just you can use phone See how he is searching and watching own monkey videos on phone http://bit.ly/2DS4p2R http://bit.ly/2DS4p2R See what happened when a lion was trying to kill man http://bit.ly/2H2zsKc http://bit.ly/2H2zsKc
houshuang 7y ago
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 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 spreadsheets or mindmaps, and everything supports live editing - I think it would be amazing for classrooms, hackathons, any kind of meeting etc. Would love to talk with anyone interested in collaborating. I have been waiting for a few features to complete to make a proper demo video, but this early one shows off some of the ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-lU-in3ydc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-lU-in3ydc (https://github.com/chili-epfl/FROG https://github.com/chili-epfl/FROG)
- VvR-Ox 7y ago
  I like what you've done. Is the FROG repo you linked the repo of the wiki? I'm just curious as it doesn't mention anything about it being a wiki in the readme (it's also a bit unclear how/what to use it for from the description).
  - houshuang 7y ago
    Yeah, we need to do a lot around messaging, to be clear - the wiki is in an early prototype and there are known bugs, etc. However if you want to try it out, install the repo (run initial_setup, then npm start server), then go to localhost:3000/wiki/ANYTHING. It will create a new wiki named ANYTHING?login=YOURNAME, and there you are. Or go to https://icchilisrv3.epfl.ch/wiki/hn/Home?login=YOURNAME https://icchilisrv3.epfl.ch/wiki/hn/Home?login=YOURNAME to test it immediately. (I added a tiny bit of content).
- nateps 7y ago
  Thanks for the shoutout! We are actively developing on ShareDB (https://github.com/share/sharedb https://github.com/share/sharedb) and if anyone is really interested in this, please reach out to me (https://github.com/nateps https://github.com/nateps). Also, Lever is looking to hire someone to work full time on our internal + open source frameworks including ShareDB.
arendtio 7y ago
What many people not fully grasp, at first sight, is that offline support for a collaborative editor is at least an order of magnitude more complex than just building a collaborative editor. In online collaborative environments, solving conflicts is relatively simple, as the changes are supposed to be small. But when two (or more) people are working on the same document without synching it for hours or days, the merge strategy has to be extremely good to come up with anything remotely intended (assuming the authors had a common intention). So just because your favorite editor can be used offline and it has an (online) collaboration feature, does not mean it is capable of being an offline-capable collaborative editor.
- lewisjoe 7y ago
  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 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 this is to fallback to differential sync when syncing huge offline edits - and present the changes as tracked-changes (underlined and striked-out) to the user. This way the user has the power to resolve the conflicts, instead of the app messing it up by itself. I'd like to hear if there are better ways to sync large offline edits, with the intentions preserved.
  - scofalik 7y ago
    > One way to solve this is to fallback to differential sync when syncing huge offline edits This is another question -- does automatic syncing make sense for huge differences in users' contents? The answer might be no. OTOH, isn't this a rare scenario? How perfect it has to be?How much of a compromise can the users accept? These are interesting questions which shows that creating this kind of software isn't easy -- both from technical and UX point of view.
    - jgtrosh 7y ago
AnthonBerg 7y ago
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 https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.02137 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/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 respect to correctness, time and space complexity, simplicity, applicability in real world co- editors, and suitability in peer-to-peer co-editing. The evidences and evaluation results from this work disprove superiority claims made by CRDT over OT on all accounts.” And it is also argued that OT is a more direct approach to the fundamental issues of realtime multiuser editing, and that that directness brings effectiveness. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18191867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18191867
- mkl 7y ago
  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.
  - alpyne 7y ago
    From the introduction: "After over a decade, however, CRDT solutions are rarely found in working co- editors or industry co-editing products, but OT solutions remain the choice for building the vast majority of co-editors. In addition, the scope of nearly all CRDT solutions for co-editing are confined to resolving issues in plain-text editing, while the scope of OT has been extended from plain-text editing to rich text word processors, and 3D digital media designs, etc."
    - mkl 7y ago
      I'm not sure what to make of that, though, as there seem to be quite a few different JSON CRDT libraries, for example. Just after that it says "The contradictions between these realities and CRDT’s purported advantages have been the source of much debate and confusion in co-editing research and developer communities." That's kind of my question/confusion: people writing CRDTs really talk them up, and I can't tell what's true in practice. I have no way to judge the accuracy of this paper myself (I don't know enough to really understand it), so I'm hoping someone who knows this stuff in a practical way can shed some light on it.
mpweiher 7y ago
Another one missing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubEthaEdit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubEthaEdit SubEthaEdit is a collaborative real-time editor designed for Mac OS X. The name comes from the Sub-Etha communication network in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. From 2003.
- musha68k 7y ago
  Not sure why you got downvoted. SubEthaEdit was magical back when - here is the link to the github repo for the recently released source: https://github.com/subethaedit/SubEthaEdit https://github.com/subethaedit/SubEthaEdit
johanneswilm 7y ago
You should try https://www.fiduswriter.org https://www.fiduswriter.org. It does have realtime collaboration, export to ODT/DOCX/Epub/LaTeX, tracked changes, WYSIWYG interface, etc. and in the latest version even a document template editor. I think relatively speaking it's quite developed in comparison to some of the other word processors presented here. It does include both frontend and backend parts to make collaboration work. (I did a lot of the programming over the past 7 years.)
houshuang 7y ago
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 this with student groups). We have some code here that works with Etherpad and ShareDB (https://github.com/chili-epfl/FROG-analytics https://github.com/chili-epfl/FROG-analytics), and happy to share preprints with anyone interested.
- nateps 7y ago
  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.
- rodneyt 7y ago
  Hi Houshuang - very interested in this area. My company produces a web app for document-based collaboration in Higher Education (working with Universities in Australia and NZ over the last 10 years). We are also research-active and involved in collaborative research projects with a number of Unis. Please contact me via my profile. ~ Rodney
LukeB42 7y ago
https://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony https://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony does realtime collaborative WYSIWYG hyperdocument editing. Imagine if Google Wave had a friends list similar to Telegram and each peer acted as a public cache for dead hypermedia.
atomanek 7y ago
A CKEditor 5 team member here. Thanks a lot for such an in-depth analysis, the article is a great read and we truly appreciate being a contender there. As for the existing implementations of CKEditor 5 with real-time collaboration, I'm afraid since the collaborative editor is usually a component of a larger platform (publishing, e-learning, CMS, intranet, documentation management system etc.) it'd be difficult to find something like a publicly available real-life use case demo of it. Without much effort, you can check out the real-time collaborative editing demos (https://ckeditor.com/collaboration/real-time-collaborative-editing/demo/?active-demo=collaboration https://ckeditor.com/collaboration/real-time-collaborative-e...) that we have on our website. A while ago we started building our own internal implementation of a collaborative document management system using CKEditor 5 and features such as real-time collaboration with track changes (something like Google Docs) for our own needs - hopefully, once we polish it a bit, we will be able to release it. We are working on publishing a few case studies with existing customers, too. As for offline collaboration, our current solution switches the editor to read-only when you e.g. lose connectivity, and then the editing mode is back on when you reconnect, along with the changes that were done in the meantime by other users when you were offline. The platform is ready to fully support "offline" writing. We tested some more complex scenarios with one of the users being offline - and it works (however, no periods as long as days of being offline). We focused on delivering other collaborative editing features such as track changes or comments that were more required by our customers. Full support for writing while being offline is still on our roadmap, though. As for the answer to why the collaboration component is not Open Source: we have currently 40 people in total working on CKEditor (CKEditor 4 & CKEditor 5). Developing such a complex application takes a lot of time and resources and we simply need money to cover the expenses. Without that, we’d not be able to spend so much time on fixing bugs or bringing new features. Also, unfortunately, we learned the hard way that some of the biggest IT companies don’t want to help Open Source projects by spending even a single dollar on them, even if they use it in an application that brings them millions of dollars. Regarding mobile support: CKEditor 5 works well on mobiles (with and without real-time collaboration). The comment you referred to was about the lack of an online demo of real-time collaboration on ckeditor.com for mobile devices. The reason behind this decision was that we are using the sidebar for displaying comments, which results in rather poor UX on mobiles. Fortunately, we are almost finishing the inline annotations plugin which will display comments inline, without using the sidebar. Feel free to assign a full Kiwi for mobile support :) Thanks again for the article!
nailer 7y ago
VSCode is collaborative and Open Source. You install a plugin and send someone a link - you are then hacking on their document, in your VScode on your keyboard with your plugins installed. Sorry I can't remember what the plugin is called, I used it every day at my last contract though. Made pairing super easy.
- js4ever 7y ago
  You are talking about LiveShare plugin for VSCode
  - nailer 7y ago
    That's it - thanks!
johnisgood 7y ago
https://gobby.github.io/ https://gobby.github.io/ ? Not web-based though.
- Svenstaro 7y ago
  That brings back memories. Used gobby all the way back in school.
havlenao 7y ago
We (at brainioapp.com) are right now working on collaborative mind map app that works like notes that you can convert (based on mark-down) to mind map. It's like a combination of Evernote and XMind. Video here: https://youtu.be/nJjFs7GmIBQ https://youtu.be/nJjFs7GmIBQ.
jahfer 7y ago
A number of years back, I wrote an OT implementation in Clojure/ClojureScript as a hobby project [1] and learned a lot along the way. I even extracting out the core client/server implementations to their own package [2]. It's an incredibly fun topic, and one that's also really challenging. It also gave me first-hand experience with fuzz-testing where I could simulate all kinds of concurrent-edit conflicts and ensure both clients came out with the same end-result. While the end client/server implementations are working, it was a lot more effort than I anticipated building a full-fledged editor on top. I was too stubborn at the time to attempt to integrate with existing RTEs though, so the most notable part of the project was the core lib, not the end product. For those interested in implementing it for themselves, I can't recommend this piece [3] by @djspiewak enough. [1] https://github.com/jahfer/ot https://github.com/jahfer/ot [2] https://github.com/jahfer/othello https://github.com/jahfer/othello [3] http://www.codecommit.com/blog/java/understanding-and-applying-operational-transformation http://www.codecommit.com/blog/java/understanding-and-applyi...
- hashhar 7y ago
  I'll recommend this link too. Saw it on HN a long time ago. It's quite long but very well explained. http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with-history/ http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with-history/
usermac 7y ago
Until last year and for two years I kept an Etherpad Lite to do shared text editing and it was amazing. It was in use for three years. The only reason I stopped using it was Google Docs, who bought the company or IP for Etherpad, can do the same thing and therefore I don't have to do the Linux maintenance. I even had it use SQlite as the database and it could handle as many as 30 simultaneous users without a hitch.
- muxator 7y ago
  Etherpad has been open source since 2009, when it was bought by Google and immediately re-licensed. It stayed open source ever since. It was written in a mix of Scala & JS. Etherpad Lite (https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite) is a port to javascript, is backed by the Free Software Conservancy and is not owned by any corporation. Yes, if you do not mind using Google's infrastructure, Google Docs is easier & more featureul. There are some cases in which running on premises may make a difference, and Etherpad strives to fill that palce.
petercooper 7y ago
Since it didn't make the list, nor has been mentioned in this thread, I want to recommend https://firepad.io/ https://firepad.io/ - we use it quite heavily at our company. It's uses Firebase behind the scenes so is essentially 'serverless' and we use it for editing our e-mail newsletters live as a team. It literally takes minutes to throw into an app.
- OJFord 7y ago
  It's in the headline image.
jimpick 7y ago
Another one for the list: https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/peer-pad https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/peer-pad Demo here: http://dev.peerpad.net/ http://dev.peerpad.net/ (this version will launch soon as soon as we complete the “pinning” / backup link to ipfs-cluster and make some UI tweaks) Built with: https://github.com/peer-base/peer-base https://github.com/peer-base/peer-base
jimpick 7y ago
A few other CRDT / collaborative text editor links I've collected: * https://blog.datproject.org/2019/03/05/caracara-react-dat-automerge/ https://blog.datproject.org/2019/03/05/caracara-react-dat-au... * https://conclave-team.github.io/conclave-site/ https://conclave-team.github.io/conclave-site/ * https://github.com/noffle/hyperpad https://github.com/noffle/hyperpad * https://xi-editor.io/xi-editor/docs/crdt.html https://xi-editor.io/xi-editor/docs/crdt.html * https://github.com/atom/teletype-crdt https://github.com/atom/teletype-crdt * https://github.com/atom/xray https://github.com/atom/xray * https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/live-share https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/live-share
- jimpick 7y ago
  Also: https://github.com/gritzko/swarm https://github.com/gritzko/swarm
- sagichmal 7y ago
  Also: http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with-history/ http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with-history/
karimtr 7y ago
Awesome! Thanks for sharing :D
dalore 7y ago
Some colleagues at work started to use https://hackmd.io/ https://hackmd.io/ for collaborative editing of markdown text. It works great.
amplecooz 7y ago
This article from the NYT tech blog is a really good read on how they created a custom text editor for the newsroom: https://open.nytimes.com/building-a-text-editor-for-a-digital-first-newsroom-f1cb8367fc21 https://open.nytimes.com/building-a-text-editor-for-a-digita... They built their custom app with the open source ProseMirror (http://prosemirror.net/ http://prosemirror.net/) toolkit.
qpiox 7y ago
I wonder why would one make a headline "Open source collaborative text editors", and then write about online editors which are neither fully open-sourced, nor fully collaborative. And then stop with them, without even mentioning solutions that are both truly real-time collaborative and truly open source.
- jtbayly 7y ago
  Such as?
  - qpiox 7y ago
    Well some of the links that others have posted here before me are such examples - starting with Etherpad. I realize that the OP is about something that works with structured text, but the headline (as is) is just click-bait.
    - juretriglav 7y ago
      That certainly wasn’t the intention, the title is a bit of a mix of: the initial intent to list all open source collaborative text editors, and then realizing, as I state in the post, that it wouldn’t add much value to have a long shallow list, then deciding to limit the scope significantly, but not wanting to redesign the headline illustration, as so much effort already went into the post (both content and the code behind it) that I just needed to stop working on it and ship it :) Hope that makes sense!
- scofalik 7y ago
  What do you mean by "not fully collaborative"? Both presented solutions seems like quite collaborative.
kemayo 7y ago
Mediawiki's visual editor has a (unreleased) collaborative mode: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Real-time_collaboration https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Real-time_collab... Hits all those open-source client and server notes, and has the advantage of supporting everything that mediawiki does.
marknadal 7y ago
For anyone who wants a quick primer on OT / CRDT text algorithms: https://gun.eco/explainers/school/class.html https://gun.eco/explainers/school/class.html ( Cartoon Explainer! ) For a detailed deep dive, including RGA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCcWpzY8dIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCcWpzY8dIA
cryptokernel 7y ago
Just leaving this here: Do tasks, get paid. Join CoinCircle's Daily Competition and get a chance to win a minimum of $10 USD Check it out: https://coincircle.com/l/50VVxbObg3 https://coincircle.com/l/50VVxbObg3
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ohiovr 7y ago
Collabora and onlyoffice are pretty good if you are looking for functionality similar to google docs.

628 points by juretriglav 7y ago

therobot24 7y ago

i feel like overleaf/sharelatex should be somewhere in this article

juretriglav 7y ago
I know the folks at Overleaf and they're awesome! However, their editor is not open source. But yes, ShareLaTex probably needs a spot on there, though I haven't looked at it in a long while and it seems to be pretty dormant in terms of development: https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex/graphs/contributors https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex/graphs/contributors Had no idea it had real-time collaboration... Wonder how it's done. Digging in now... :) If you're using it, it would be great to get your thoughts on it and what particular things you like about it. Update: ShareLaTeX uses a string-based collaboration algorithm (i.e. LaTeX is plain text, not a structured document format), and seems to be limited to max 2 collaborators (though that could be old info), so that explains why it didn't appear on my radar. I'll take it for a spin anyway, thanks!
- williamstein 7y ago
  "seems to be pretty dormant in terms of development" -- that's because Overleaf purchased ShareLaTeX. https://www.overleaf.com/blog/518-exciting-news-sharelatex-is-joining-overleaf https://www.overleaf.com/blog/518-exciting-news-sharelatex-i... Also, you might be unaware of CoCalc, which is open source https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc. CoCalc supports collaborative editing of many structured documents, including Jupyter notebooks, but not rich text at present.
  - jdleesmiller 7y ago
    Hello, cofounder of Overleaf here. Just to be clear, open source development of ShareLaTeX is ongoing and indeed has accelerated since Overleaf and ShareLaTeX joined forces. ShareLaTeX is split into many repos, and the one linked above is a 'coordinator' repo that doesn't get updated much. See https://github.com/sharelatex/web-sharelatex https://github.com/sharelatex/web-sharelatex for one that is more active. The free version of Overleaf/ShareLaTeX does have a restriction on the number of collaborators: you plus one other. Paid accounts support more collaborators [1], and you can also get more collaborators on the free account by referring others [2]. [1] https://www.overleaf.com/user/subscription/plans https://www.overleaf.com/user/subscription/plans [2] https://www.overleaf.com/user/bonus https://www.overleaf.com/user/bonus (requires an account)

Iv 7y ago

I love your description of "the dive". I am happy to see I am not the only one experiencing these recurring devouring interests that bring me much much deeper than I would like to go until I am starting to fork a github repo at 2am wondering "what the hell am I doing?" And that article is tangentially related to a recurring interest of mine (shared editable 3d universe in which you can code collaboratively). If you happened to have an article comparing the merit of several server architectures/algorithms for collaborative text edition, I think many things can be related. I am now reading about CRDT (What the hell am I doing?) and that's something I may use to edit a scene graph collaboratively!

juretriglav 7y ago
Hey thanks for that. :) Diving is super fun but also exceptionally exhausting. But often it's impossible to 'load' a complex problem in your head if you don't dive in for hours. Would be nice if there was a less stressful way. In terms of editable 3d universes (whoah!), have you considered chucking together Three.js's JSON scene description (https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/wiki/JSON-Object-Scene-format-4 https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/wiki/JSON-Object-Scene-fo...) with https://github.com/automerge/automerge https://github.com/automerge/automerge, a CRDT for JSON? What could possibly go wrong?!
- ilaksh 7y ago
  ShareJS has a JSON editor example https://github.com/josephg/ShareJS/tree/master/examples/public https://github.com/josephg/ShareJS/tree/master/examples/publ...
  - Iv 7y ago
    Thanks! But a big part of my obsession is to be able to modify a 3d universe from within. I won't claim it is practical or a good idea in any way, just an obsessive thing I want to try.
    - ilaksh 7y ago
      Right I understood that. I was replying to the other guy who suggested putting the scene in a JSON Three.js thing. So the idea was that the thing I suggested was just a possibly easy way to get a collaborative JSON editor into your program.

im_down_w_otp 7y ago

I would be very appreciative if Google made a stripped down version of Google Docs for plaintext editing. There are a bunch of basic integration features that would also be fantastic, but if the product was literally just Google Docs, minus the WYSIWYG bits, and all plaintext w/ maybe some syntax highlighting thrown in, I'd be super happy.

choward 7y ago
> Google Docs, minus the WYSIWYG bits, and all plaintext w/ maybe some syntax highlighting thrown in And the feature creep begins. Eventually you'll be asking for a full blown IDE.
- ma2rten 7y ago
  Google has actually already has an internal cloud-based IDE.
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    Which doesn't do real-time collaboration, and due to the way it's backing store works, likely never will.
jraph 7y ago
This looks like etherpad https://etherpad.org/ https://etherpad.org/ Not plain text only but probably can be configured for that. No syntax highlighting.
twblalock 7y ago
> Google Docs, minus the WYSIWYG bits, and all plaintext w/ maybe some syntax highlighting thrown in That is the subset of features you want. Everyone else wants a slightly different subset of features. Add all of those subsets together and you end up with the total feature set of Google Docs.
houshuang 7y ago
That's basically what I'm trying to build - we're starting with Quill.js and ShareDB, adding extensions, configuring, and then adding a plugin system based on React, which can take arbitrary components all based on ShareDB sync (think spreadsheets, forms, but I'd also love to integrate the Pyiodide stuff to have runnable Python code inside a rich text document, etc). We built this as part of a synchronous collaborative learning platform, but I'm currently trying to extract the key components so that it can be a stand-alone open source library that others can help build on. Very early prototype: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@chilifrog/reactive-rich-text https://www.npmjs.com/package/@chilifrog/reactive-rich-text

alceta 7y ago

We went with CKEditor5 with a commonmark backend and I cannot recommend it more highly. commonmark data is converted upon initially opening and when closing the editor, allowing all native functionality to happen efficiently. However I do note that we do not yet have a production ready backend for collaborative editing. I would suggest to use their service if possible, since we're developing an open source product it would not be an option for us. There is a quite leaning curve when implementing new plugins due to the strict separation of model and data (commonmark in our case) and user-facing views.

juretriglav 7y ago
CKEditor 5 looks amazing (from tech to docs), but that lack of an available backend is a bummer. Do you know if there's anything out there that would work as an initial/hacky/example backend? How do you plan to tackle this?

ilaksh 7y ago

Etherpad (etherpad lite) has plugins for formatting https://static.etherpad.org/plugins.html https://static.etherpad.org/plugins.html You can try a lot of them out in the demo online https://etherpad.org/ https://etherpad.org/

nullc 7y ago

Emacs can connect to multiple screens.

jsilence 7y ago
Pointers?
- dima55 7y ago
  Run and emacs server, and multiple simultaneous connections into it.
jcagalawan 7y ago
Is there a setup that lets multiple people edit at the same time?
- nullc 7y ago
  Yes. It's not the sort of thing you'd use with untrusted parties over the internet since it requires access to the remote x-server, but it totally works for collaborative editing (esp with people sitting in the same room): https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Multiple-Displays.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mu...
ginko 7y ago
Couldn't you also just setup an emacs server that listens over a TCP socket? https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/TCP-Emacs-server.html#TCP-Emacs-server https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/TC...

alalonde 7y ago

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 working on both offline mode and a generic rich-text data model with support for the major editors. If anyone's interested, I'd happily do some Q and A here.

blotter_paper 7y ago
I appreciate that you mentioned a competitor without shamelessly plugging your own product, but out of curiosity, and if you don't mind sharing, what editor do you work on?
- alalonde 7y ago
  You can currently already do good-enough-for-most DOM-level synchronization using any editor, of which we have a few examples. A lot of the examples of RTC out there (apps using TogetherJS for instance) are doing this already. For rich text, we'd like to be able to provide 100% support for a particular editor's capabilities, which necessitates a deeper, custom data model. One of our value propositions is a unified backend for dealing with any JSON data (and eventually beyond), avoiding binding server-side code to a particular choice of UI component.
  - houshuang 7y ago
    I am curious about this argument - I think CKEditor 5 made a similar one in this epic blog post about how they implemented real-time collaboration (https://ckeditor.com/blog/Lessons-learned-from-creating-a-rich-text-editor-with-real-time-collaboration/ https://ckeditor.com/blog/Lessons-learned-from-creating-a-ri...). We're using Quill.js with ShareDB, which supports JSON structures (which is great, because for us we often have documents with several rich text fields, and other complex structures). So far we've been able to do anything we wanted with Quill, and I've never felt limited by the data structures we have available... (We also do all kinds of other stuff with ShareDB JSON). I guess one reason you could need custom types would be to ensure consistency - if two keys depend on each other, and one user sets one key, and the other user sets another key, and the document is now invalid, you'd need the engine to be able to reconcile at a higher level?

jsilence 7y ago

What about Cryptpad? https://cryptpad.fr/ https://cryptpad.fr/

ilaksh 7y ago
Its full copyleft AGPL which could be an issue for someone trying to use it in a commercial application. But for other uses, it looks absolutely incredible. https://github.com/xwiki-labs/cryptpad https://github.com/xwiki-labs/cryptpad
- cobbzilla 7y ago
  From the Cryptpad README, gotta love the humor: The server does have a certain power, it can send you evil javascript which does the wrong thing (leaks the key or the data back to the server or to someone else). This is however an active attack which makes it detectable. The NSA really hates doing these because they might get caught and laughed at and humiliated in front of the whole world (again). If you're making the NSA mad enough for them to use an active attack against you, Great Success Highfive, now take the battery out of your computer before it spawns Agent Smith.
oefrha 7y ago
I used (a self-hosted instance of) CryptPad for a while earlier this year, but unfortunately the editor is borderline unusable in iOS Safari.

jimbo1qaz 7y ago

HackMD is a decent online Markdown editor.

hyperion2010 7y ago

All I want is org mode backed by a crdt or similar so I don't have to convert in and out every time I need to collaborate with someone.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mochidusk 7y ago

I was able to get real-time collaborative text editing to work on one of my side projects by combining quill.js[1], ot.js[2], and firebase[3]. This was a few years ago when there weren't any fully open-source options. I'm in the process of switching out firebase for an elixir/phoenix backend[4]. I'm really glad for this article because it captures the exact feelings that I have. [1] https://quilljs.com/ https://quilljs.com/ [2] https://github.com/Operational-Transformation/ot.js/ https://github.com/Operational-Transformation/ot.js/ [3] https://firebase.google.com/ https://firebase.google.com/ [4] https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix

ilaksh 7y ago
That looks like a really cool project but.. there weren't any fully open source options? The original Etherpad came out 10 years ago. Etherpad Lite has been out for several years also and has had formatting plugins for quite awhile.
- mochidusk 7y ago
  You're right, I completely forgot about Etherpad. But I don't consider Etherpad the same as Quilljs or ProseMirror. Etherpad is something you host (an app itself) while the other text editors are something you can build upon/integrate into your app. I didn't want to host an instance of Etherpad, I needed a library. I wanted an editing experience similar to Medium.com text editor: consistent, well-formed html output and formatting. At the time, Quilljs was one of the best open-source editor that produced consistent output regardless of the browser. Also I didn't want to store html, I wanted to store operations in the database. I have an app similar to Figma[1] (basically real-time Sketch) and I needed just the real-time text editing feature. [1] https://www.figma.com/ https://www.figma.com/
houshuang 7y ago
tmbb has been doing work on writing a ShareDB compatible backend in Elixir (https://elixirforum.com/t/realtime-collaboration/9736/5 https://elixirforum.com/t/realtime-collaboration/9736/5), this has long been a dream of mine. If not, having a separate Node server that just deals with ShareDB documents would also be feasible - all the app logic could still be in Elixir. Happy to share stuff we've been doing with Quill, for example my company recently sponsored work on shared cursors/presence for Quill.

Philipp0205 7y ago

Is there a way to use one of them without hosting it yourself?

ilaksh 7y ago
Yes see etherpad.org
- Philipp0205 7y ago
  Ty!
tjmehta 7y ago
Also check out https://codeshare.io https://codeshare.io
- Philipp0205 7y ago
  Ty!

willvarfar 7y ago

So, lots of open-source UIs that use closed-source servers for collaborative editing? This figures. This is one of the ways 'open source' companies can make money. So, the author sets about making an open-source collaboration server that inter-operates with the existing open-source editor? Kudos! But now the company can retaliate by adding features or inconsistencies to the closed source server and its integration into the UI, making the open-source server forever out-of-date and playing catch-up. Ouch.

mushufasa 7y ago

The author didn't mention TinyMCE. Was that on purpose? Is it not good?

jldugger 7y ago
Does it support real time collaborative editing?

c0g 7y ago

Any whiteboard products? Collaborative drawing would make remote work lovely.

phillc73 7y ago
I've just found that Cryptpad offers a whiteboard feature.[1] I know nothing more about them and was just checking them out after seeing the comment in this thread. [1] https://cryptpad.fr/whiteboard/ https://cryptpad.fr/whiteboard/

threespice 7y ago

This was one of the project idea I made myself work on during this April. The motivation being, "how hard is it to make a real-time code editor". Long story short, it is far more complicated than I had imagine and to complete in less than a week. Implementing the CRDT itself, the logic itself is challenging and than putting it down to code is another story. From my understanding, an implementation of logoot[1] is built to create the skeleton of a collaborative environment. From there on, you have the building block to make other things work with it, such as collaborative canvas. I built one using Socket.io on Angular and used Ace Editor own implementation of CRDT > https://github.com/abdusamed91/realtime-codeeditor https://github.com/abdusamed91/realtime-codeeditor I used the following references to build it 1) https://alligator.io/angular/socket-io/ https://alligator.io/angular/socket-io/ 2) https://medium.com/@ofir3322/create-an-online-ide-with-angular-6-nodejs-part-1-163a939a7929 https://medium.com/@ofir3322/create-an-online-ide-with-angul... To get started with the theory CRDT low level algorithm, these two post go into great details 1) https://conclave-team.github.io/conclave-site/ https://conclave-team.github.io/conclave-site/ 2) http://digitalfreepen.com/2017/10/06/simple-real-time- http://digitalfreepen.com/2017/10/06/simple-real-time- collaborative-text-editor.html [1]https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00432368/document https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00432368/document I'd love to take it to another level if anyone here has mutual interest in this field of work.

Fnoord 7y ago

tmux + vim (akin to Windows Remote Assistance) can be good enough in some situations.

arendtio 7y ago
Not really. I use tmux + vim on a daily basis, but it starts with having just one cursor. Goes on with not being web-based and in the end, it has no offline collaboration support (that requires some kind of merge strategy). So yes, there are some use-cases when it is sufficient for collaboration, but most certainly not for the use-cases described in the blog post.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  My use-case isn't similar to the ones described in the blog post. You could easily make tmux + vim web-based if you desire (I don't see why, I'd just use Mosh or SSH instead). For merging you could abstract the content to a Git repository. For multiple cursors you could try Wemux [1]. [1] https://github.com/zolrath/wemux https://github.com/zolrath/wemux

keybits 7y ago

I'm curious about the choice of PubSweet for the collaboration components. Can you summarise what functions PubSweet is performing in your example app, and are there alternatives to PubSweet that you looked at for this functionality?

juretriglav 7y ago
It mainly has to do with familiarity with the framework. The focus of the work was on the collaborative server bits, not learning a new framework/ecosystem and I feel very comfortable in PubSweet, being its lead dev. The project also served as an app-building exercise, as we’re just now meeting in Cambridge to focus on that aspect and reusable components within PubSweet. And when all said and done, there weren’t any friction points with this approach, it all just sort of worked, from data model migrations to React frontend, so yay :) Hope that clears it up!

mrrobotchicken 7y ago

Can't see any link to collaborative demos for CKEditor 5 in the article but here it is: https://ckeditor.com/collaboration/real-time-collaborative-editing/demo/ https://ckeditor.com/collaboration/real-time-collaborative-e...

RobertRoberts 7y ago
Anyone have any experience using the collaboration feature of CKEditor5 they can share?

idleherb0 7y ago

I’m new to the topic from a technical point of view. I was wondering if the conflict resolving issues are fundamentally different from online gaming scenarios. I.e., could the ways problems are solved in multiplayer games also be applied to collaborative editors and vice versa?

unixhero 7y ago
Good question, but it could be responded to by writing a thesis.
- scofalik 7y ago
  We frequently joke in our company that we'd love to write a thesis on OT and get a better academical grade ;).
arianvanp 7y ago
The quake3 netcode is eventually consistent and always reminded me of CRDTs. https://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/network.php https://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/network.php
- idleherb0 7y ago
  I was thinking exactly about q3a when I wrote the question!
jlokier 7y ago
That's a great question. One of the differences is real-time games do motion prediction, to hide latency. I haven't heard of editors doing so.
- jkaptur 7y ago
  Arguably not an “editor”, but I think the mosh shell input does something like this.
alalonde 7y ago

sara7262 7y ago

Who is Satan and why there is evil Best video about this with proofs https://youtu.be/AWNM1-xYI5E https://youtu.be/AWNM1-xYI5E Funny monkey using phone in video Don't think just you can use phone See how he is searching and watching own monkey videos on phone http://bit.ly/2DS4p2R http://bit.ly/2DS4p2R See what happened when a lion was trying to kill man http://bit.ly/2H2zsKc http://bit.ly/2H2zsKc

houshuang 7y ago

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 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 spreadsheets or mindmaps, and everything supports live editing - I think it would be amazing for classrooms, hackathons, any kind of meeting etc. Would love to talk with anyone interested in collaborating. I have been waiting for a few features to complete to make a proper demo video, but this early one shows off some of the ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-lU-in3ydc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-lU-in3ydc (https://github.com/chili-epfl/FROG https://github.com/chili-epfl/FROG)

VvR-Ox 7y ago
I like what you've done. Is the FROG repo you linked the repo of the wiki? I'm just curious as it doesn't mention anything about it being a wiki in the readme (it's also a bit unclear how/what to use it for from the description).
- houshuang 7y ago
  Yeah, we need to do a lot around messaging, to be clear - the wiki is in an early prototype and there are known bugs, etc. However if you want to try it out, install the repo (run initial_setup, then npm start server), then go to localhost:3000/wiki/ANYTHING. It will create a new wiki named ANYTHING?login=YOURNAME, and there you are. Or go to https://icchilisrv3.epfl.ch/wiki/hn/Home?login=YOURNAME https://icchilisrv3.epfl.ch/wiki/hn/Home?login=YOURNAME to test it immediately. (I added a tiny bit of content).
nateps 7y ago
Thanks for the shoutout! We are actively developing on ShareDB (https://github.com/share/sharedb https://github.com/share/sharedb) and if anyone is really interested in this, please reach out to me (https://github.com/nateps https://github.com/nateps). Also, Lever is looking to hire someone to work full time on our internal + open source frameworks including ShareDB.

arendtio 7y ago

What many people not fully grasp, at first sight, is that offline support for a collaborative editor is at least an order of magnitude more complex than just building a collaborative editor. In online collaborative environments, solving conflicts is relatively simple, as the changes are supposed to be small. But when two (or more) people are working on the same document without synching it for hours or days, the merge strategy has to be extremely good to come up with anything remotely intended (assuming the authors had a common intention). So just because your favorite editor can be used offline and it has an (online) collaboration feature, does not mean it is capable of being an offline-capable collaborative editor.

lewisjoe 7y ago
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 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 this is to fallback to differential sync when syncing huge offline edits - and present the changes as tracked-changes (underlined and striked-out) to the user. This way the user has the power to resolve the conflicts, instead of the app messing it up by itself. I'd like to hear if there are better ways to sync large offline edits, with the intentions preserved.
- scofalik 7y ago
  > One way to solve this is to fallback to differential sync when syncing huge offline edits This is another question -- does automatic syncing make sense for huge differences in users' contents? The answer might be no. OTOH, isn't this a rare scenario? How perfect it has to be?How much of a compromise can the users accept? These are interesting questions which shows that creating this kind of software isn't easy -- both from technical and UX point of view.
  - jgtrosh 7y ago

AnthonBerg 7y ago

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 https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.02137 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/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 respect to correctness, time and space complexity, simplicity, applicability in real world co- editors, and suitability in peer-to-peer co-editing. The evidences and evaluation results from this work disprove superiority claims made by CRDT over OT on all accounts.” And it is also argued that OT is a more direct approach to the fundamental issues of realtime multiuser editing, and that that directness brings effectiveness. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18191867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18191867

mkl 7y ago
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.
- alpyne 7y ago
  From the introduction: "After over a decade, however, CRDT solutions are rarely found in working co- editors or industry co-editing products, but OT solutions remain the choice for building the vast majority of co-editors. In addition, the scope of nearly all CRDT solutions for co-editing are confined to resolving issues in plain-text editing, while the scope of OT has been extended from plain-text editing to rich text word processors, and 3D digital media designs, etc."
  - mkl 7y ago
    I'm not sure what to make of that, though, as there seem to be quite a few different JSON CRDT libraries, for example. Just after that it says "The contradictions between these realities and CRDT’s purported advantages have been the source of much debate and confusion in co-editing research and developer communities." That's kind of my question/confusion: people writing CRDTs really talk them up, and I can't tell what's true in practice. I have no way to judge the accuracy of this paper myself (I don't know enough to really understand it), so I'm hoping someone who knows this stuff in a practical way can shed some light on it.

mpweiher 7y ago

Another one missing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubEthaEdit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubEthaEdit SubEthaEdit is a collaborative real-time editor designed for Mac OS X. The name comes from the Sub-Etha communication network in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. From 2003.

musha68k 7y ago
Not sure why you got downvoted. SubEthaEdit was magical back when - here is the link to the github repo for the recently released source: https://github.com/subethaedit/SubEthaEdit https://github.com/subethaedit/SubEthaEdit

johanneswilm 7y ago

You should try https://www.fiduswriter.org https://www.fiduswriter.org. It does have realtime collaboration, export to ODT/DOCX/Epub/LaTeX, tracked changes, WYSIWYG interface, etc. and in the latest version even a document template editor. I think relatively speaking it's quite developed in comparison to some of the other word processors presented here. It does include both frontend and backend parts to make collaboration work. (I did a lot of the programming over the past 7 years.)

houshuang 7y ago

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 this with student groups). We have some code here that works with Etherpad and ShareDB (https://github.com/chili-epfl/FROG-analytics https://github.com/chili-epfl/FROG-analytics), and happy to share preprints with anyone interested.

nateps 7y ago
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.
rodneyt 7y ago
Hi Houshuang - very interested in this area. My company produces a web app for document-based collaboration in Higher Education (working with Universities in Australia and NZ over the last 10 years). We are also research-active and involved in collaborative research projects with a number of Unis. Please contact me via my profile. ~ Rodney

LukeB42 7y ago

https://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony https://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony does realtime collaborative WYSIWYG hyperdocument editing. Imagine if Google Wave had a friends list similar to Telegram and each peer acted as a public cache for dead hypermedia.

atomanek 7y ago

A CKEditor 5 team member here. Thanks a lot for such an in-depth analysis, the article is a great read and we truly appreciate being a contender there. As for the existing implementations of CKEditor 5 with real-time collaboration, I'm afraid since the collaborative editor is usually a component of a larger platform (publishing, e-learning, CMS, intranet, documentation management system etc.) it'd be difficult to find something like a publicly available real-life use case demo of it. Without much effort, you can check out the real-time collaborative editing demos (https://ckeditor.com/collaboration/real-time-collaborative-editing/demo/?active-demo=collaboration https://ckeditor.com/collaboration/real-time-collaborative-e...) that we have on our website. A while ago we started building our own internal implementation of a collaborative document management system using CKEditor 5 and features such as real-time collaboration with track changes (something like Google Docs) for our own needs - hopefully, once we polish it a bit, we will be able to release it. We are working on publishing a few case studies with existing customers, too. As for offline collaboration, our current solution switches the editor to read-only when you e.g. lose connectivity, and then the editing mode is back on when you reconnect, along with the changes that were done in the meantime by other users when you were offline. The platform is ready to fully support "offline" writing. We tested some more complex scenarios with one of the users being offline - and it works (however, no periods as long as days of being offline). We focused on delivering other collaborative editing features such as track changes or comments that were more required by our customers. Full support for writing while being offline is still on our roadmap, though. As for the answer to why the collaboration component is not Open Source: we have currently 40 people in total working on CKEditor (CKEditor 4 & CKEditor 5). Developing such a complex application takes a lot of time and resources and we simply need money to cover the expenses. Without that, we’d not be able to spend so much time on fixing bugs or bringing new features. Also, unfortunately, we learned the hard way that some of the biggest IT companies don’t want to help Open Source projects by spending even a single dollar on them, even if they use it in an application that brings them millions of dollars. Regarding mobile support: CKEditor 5 works well on mobiles (with and without real-time collaboration). The comment you referred to was about the lack of an online demo of real-time collaboration on ckeditor.com for mobile devices. The reason behind this decision was that we are using the sidebar for displaying comments, which results in rather poor UX on mobiles. Fortunately, we are almost finishing the inline annotations plugin which will display comments inline, without using the sidebar. Feel free to assign a full Kiwi for mobile support :) Thanks again for the article!

nailer 7y ago

VSCode is collaborative and Open Source. You install a plugin and send someone a link - you are then hacking on their document, in your VScode on your keyboard with your plugins installed. Sorry I can't remember what the plugin is called, I used it every day at my last contract though. Made pairing super easy.

js4ever 7y ago
You are talking about LiveShare plugin for VSCode
- nailer 7y ago
  That's it - thanks!

johnisgood 7y ago

https://gobby.github.io/ https://gobby.github.io/ ? Not web-based though.

Svenstaro 7y ago
That brings back memories. Used gobby all the way back in school.

havlenao 7y ago

We (at brainioapp.com) are right now working on collaborative mind map app that works like notes that you can convert (based on mark-down) to mind map. It's like a combination of Evernote and XMind. Video here: https://youtu.be/nJjFs7GmIBQ https://youtu.be/nJjFs7GmIBQ.

jahfer 7y ago

A number of years back, I wrote an OT implementation in Clojure/ClojureScript as a hobby project [1] and learned a lot along the way. I even extracting out the core client/server implementations to their own package [2]. It's an incredibly fun topic, and one that's also really challenging. It also gave me first-hand experience with fuzz-testing where I could simulate all kinds of concurrent-edit conflicts and ensure both clients came out with the same end-result. While the end client/server implementations are working, it was a lot more effort than I anticipated building a full-fledged editor on top. I was too stubborn at the time to attempt to integrate with existing RTEs though, so the most notable part of the project was the core lib, not the end product. For those interested in implementing it for themselves, I can't recommend this piece [3] by @djspiewak enough. [1] https://github.com/jahfer/ot https://github.com/jahfer/ot [2] https://github.com/jahfer/othello https://github.com/jahfer/othello [3] http://www.codecommit.com/blog/java/understanding-and-applying-operational-transformation http://www.codecommit.com/blog/java/understanding-and-applyi...

hashhar 7y ago
I'll recommend this link too. Saw it on HN a long time ago. It's quite long but very well explained. http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with-history/ http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with-history/

usermac 7y ago

Until last year and for two years I kept an Etherpad Lite to do shared text editing and it was amazing. It was in use for three years. The only reason I stopped using it was Google Docs, who bought the company or IP for Etherpad, can do the same thing and therefore I don't have to do the Linux maintenance. I even had it use SQlite as the database and it could handle as many as 30 simultaneous users without a hitch.

muxator 7y ago
Etherpad has been open source since 2009, when it was bought by Google and immediately re-licensed. It stayed open source ever since. It was written in a mix of Scala & JS. Etherpad Lite (https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite) is a port to javascript, is backed by the Free Software Conservancy and is not owned by any corporation. Yes, if you do not mind using Google's infrastructure, Google Docs is easier & more featureul. There are some cases in which running on premises may make a difference, and Etherpad strives to fill that palce.

petercooper 7y ago

Since it didn't make the list, nor has been mentioned in this thread, I want to recommend https://firepad.io/ https://firepad.io/ - we use it quite heavily at our company. It's uses Firebase behind the scenes so is essentially 'serverless' and we use it for editing our e-mail newsletters live as a team. It literally takes minutes to throw into an app.

OJFord 7y ago
It's in the headline image.

jimpick 7y ago

Another one for the list: https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/peer-pad https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/peer-pad Demo here: http://dev.peerpad.net/ http://dev.peerpad.net/ (this version will launch soon as soon as we complete the “pinning” / backup link to ipfs-cluster and make some UI tweaks) Built with: https://github.com/peer-base/peer-base https://github.com/peer-base/peer-base

jimpick 7y ago

A few other CRDT / collaborative text editor links I've collected: * https://blog.datproject.org/2019/03/05/caracara-react-dat-automerge/ https://blog.datproject.org/2019/03/05/caracara-react-dat-au... * https://conclave-team.github.io/conclave-site/ https://conclave-team.github.io/conclave-site/ * https://github.com/noffle/hyperpad https://github.com/noffle/hyperpad * https://xi-editor.io/xi-editor/docs/crdt.html https://xi-editor.io/xi-editor/docs/crdt.html * https://github.com/atom/teletype-crdt https://github.com/atom/teletype-crdt * https://github.com/atom/xray https://github.com/atom/xray * https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/live-share https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/live-share

jimpick 7y ago
Also: https://github.com/gritzko/swarm https://github.com/gritzko/swarm
sagichmal 7y ago
Also: http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with-history/ http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with-history/

karimtr 7y ago

Awesome! Thanks for sharing :D

dalore 7y ago

Some colleagues at work started to use https://hackmd.io/ https://hackmd.io/ for collaborative editing of markdown text. It works great.

amplecooz 7y ago

This article from the NYT tech blog is a really good read on how they created a custom text editor for the newsroom: https://open.nytimes.com/building-a-text-editor-for-a-digital-first-newsroom-f1cb8367fc21 https://open.nytimes.com/building-a-text-editor-for-a-digita... They built their custom app with the open source ProseMirror (http://prosemirror.net/ http://prosemirror.net/) toolkit.

qpiox 7y ago

I wonder why would one make a headline "Open source collaborative text editors", and then write about online editors which are neither fully open-sourced, nor fully collaborative. And then stop with them, without even mentioning solutions that are both truly real-time collaborative and truly open source.

jtbayly 7y ago
Such as?
- qpiox 7y ago
  Well some of the links that others have posted here before me are such examples - starting with Etherpad. I realize that the OP is about something that works with structured text, but the headline (as is) is just click-bait.
  - juretriglav 7y ago
    That certainly wasn’t the intention, the title is a bit of a mix of: the initial intent to list all open source collaborative text editors, and then realizing, as I state in the post, that it wouldn’t add much value to have a long shallow list, then deciding to limit the scope significantly, but not wanting to redesign the headline illustration, as so much effort already went into the post (both content and the code behind it) that I just needed to stop working on it and ship it :) Hope that makes sense!
scofalik 7y ago
What do you mean by "not fully collaborative"? Both presented solutions seems like quite collaborative.

kemayo 7y ago

Mediawiki's visual editor has a (unreleased) collaborative mode: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Real-time_collaboration https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Real-time_collab... Hits all those open-source client and server notes, and has the advantage of supporting everything that mediawiki does.

marknadal 7y ago

For anyone who wants a quick primer on OT / CRDT text algorithms: https://gun.eco/explainers/school/class.html https://gun.eco/explainers/school/class.html ( Cartoon Explainer! ) For a detailed deep dive, including RGA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCcWpzY8dIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCcWpzY8dIA

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ohiovr 7y ago

Collabora and onlyoffice are pretty good if you are looking for functionality similar to google docs.