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. An reverse-engineering attempt in Emacs failed to produce anything. |
| DocSynch | 2004-2007 | ? | built on top of IRC! |
| Gobby | 2005-now | C, multi-platform | first open, solid and reliable implementation and still around! The protocol ("libinfinoted") is 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. |
| Ethercalc | 2005-now | Web, Javascript | First spreadsheet, along with Google docs |
| moonedit | 2005-2008? | ? | Original website died. Other user's cursors visible and emulated keystrokes noises. Included a calculator and music sequencer! |
| synchroedit | 2006-2007 | ? | First web app. |
| Inkscape | 2007-2011 | C++ | First graphics editor with collaborative features backed by the "whiteboard" plugin built on top of Jabber, now defunct. |
| Abiword | 2008-now | C++ | First word processor |
| Etherpad | 2008-now | Web | First solid web app. 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. |
| Wave | 2009-2010 | Web, Java | Failed attempt at a grand protocol unification |
| 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 |
| LibreOffice Online | 2015-now | Web | free Google docs equivalent, now integrated in Nextcloud |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| crdt.el | 2020-now | Emacs | First CRDT plugin for Emacs, Emacs-only |
Hello,
Thanks for your interesting post!
I recently did a similar search, I retained the following:
Cheers!
The TogetherJS library by Mozilla was promising... 5 years ago: https://github.com/mozilla/togetherjs
Also worth a mention, good old Google Wave from 2009. It had it all (too much?)
I don't get why Collaborative Editing isn't a standard wiki feature by now.
Saw a demo a couple of months ago:
It's based on automerge, which is a JSON CDRT and dat, a modern updatable bittorrent.
Thanks for all the feedback! I've updated the table to add Ethercalc, Inkscape (how could I forget our poor Jabber friend!) and Abiword (that one still works??).
I've also fixed the "NextCloud" entry to be "LibreOffice Online" as, it's true, it's just one frontend. Plus it promotes it earlier in the history. Funny to notice that Abiword beat LibreOffice on that..
I've also added Google Wave, even though it was fairly short lived, in retrospect.
Thanks to the other suggestions, but the goal here is not to make an exhaustive inventory of all possible collaborative editors: there are way more than what's listed here. It seems that everyone thinks they can do better than whoever came before, so I tried to keep the list to project which brought something really new to the pool and/or that succeeded in a significant way. I also try to keep the list limited to free software project and open platforms, except when there is a really notable change.
I do believe it was Collabora who developed the 'online' part and released it first, and then contributed it back to LibreOffice which now also has it - credit-where-it-is-due would be to call it Collabora Online, I think.
Sadly the collaborative editing never made it into Kate proper...
Note that Abiword doesn't have a web view like Collabora/LibreOffice has, and LibreOffice still doesn't have collaborative editing on the desktop like Abiword has (but I believe work is happening to enable it).
There once upon a time was also the quite interesting Documents app for ownCloud/Nextcloud based on WebODF. It was a full javascript ODF editor that used the DOM tree, css etc to directly display and edit documents. So it had no import/export, it just directly loaded them and showed the documents in the browser! Quite clever, I don't think as of today any web editor can do that still). The biggest advantage was that the editor was non-destructive, even if it didn't understand or know how to display parts, they wouldn't get deleted/damaged on saving. There is a back-end for it that uses LibreOffice on the server to convert MS Word docs into ODF and back after editing, but, as that IS a destructive import/export, this has its limitations. https://github.com/nextcloud/documents
Sadly, while we kept it working with Nc 12 and will probably make it work with 13 someday, the actual engine is unmaintained so it won't be useful for much longer as browsers move on and break compatibility...