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Historical inventory of collaborative editors
A quick inventory of major collaborative editor efforts, in chronological order.
As with any such list, it must start with an honorable mention to the mother of all demos during which Doug Engelbart presented what is basically an exhaustive list of all possible software written since 1968. This includes not only a collaborative editor, but graphics, programming and math editor.
Everything else after that demo is just a slower implementation to compensate for the acceleration of hardware.
Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. - Wirth's law
So without further ado, here is the list of notable collaborative editors that I could find. By "notable" i mean that they introduce a notable feature or implementation detail.
| Project | Date | Platform | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| SubEthaEdit | 2003-2015? | Mac-only | first collaborative, real-time, multi-cursor editor I could find. reverse-engineering attempt in Emacs |
| DocSynch | 2004-2007 | ? | built on top of IRC |
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| Gobby | 2005-now | C, multi-platform | first open, solid and reliable implementation. still around! protocol ("libinfinoted") notoriously hard to port to other editors (e.g. Rudel failed to implement this in Emacs. 0.7 release in jan 2017 adds possible python bindings that might improve this. Interesting plugins: autosave to disk. |
| moonedit | 2005-2008? | ? | Original website died. Other user's cursors visible and emulated keystrokes noises. Calculator and music sequencer. |
| synchroedit | 2006-2007 | ? | First web app. |
| Etherpad | 2008-now | Web | First solid webapp. Originally developped as a heavy Java app in 2008, acquired and opensourced by google in 2009, then rewritten in Node.js in 2011. Widely used. |
| CRDT | 2011 | Specification | Standard for replicating a document's datastructure among different computers reliably. |
| Operational transform | 2013 | Specification | Similar to CRDT, yet, well, different. |
| Floobits | 2013-now | ? | Commercial, but opensource plugins for different editors |
| HackMD | 2015-now | ? | Commercial but opensource. Inspired by hackpad, which was bought up by Dropbox. |
| Cryptpad | 2016-now | web? | spin-off of xwiki. encrypted, "zero-knowledge" on server |
| Prosemirror | 2016-now | Web, Node.JS | "Tries to bridge the gap between Markdown text editing and classical WYSIWYG editors." Not really an editor, but something that can be used to build one. |
| Qill | 2013-now | Web, Node.JS | Rich text editor, also javascript. Not sure it is really collaborative. |
| Nextcloud | 2017-now | Web | Some sort of Google docs equivalent |
| Teletype | 2017-now | WebRTC, Node.JS | For the GitHub's Atom editor, introduces "portal" idea that makes guests follow what the host is doing across multiple docs. p2p with webRTC after visit to introduction server, CRDT based. |
| Tandem | 2018-now | Node.JS? | Plugins for atom, vim, neovim, sublime... uses a relay to setup p2p connexions CRDT based. Dubious license issues were resolved thanks to the involvement of Debian developers, which makes it a promising standard to follow in the future. |
Other lists
via: https://anarc.at/blog/2018-06-26-collaborative-editors-history/