Issues and Experiences in Building Heterogeneous Co-Editing Systems

Abstract

Most past research efforts in co-editing focused on homogeneous co-editing, which allows multiple users to use the same editor to edit shared documents in the same session, and nearly all real-world co-editors, such as Google Docs, are homogeneous co-editors. In this work, we explore issues and solutions in building heterogeneous co-editing systems, which allow multiple users to use different editors to edit shared documents in the same session. To drive our exploration, we built a prototype heterogeneous co-editing system, named CoVim+CoEmacs, which allows multiple users to use full functionalities and UI features of two comprehensive and rivalry text editors, Vim and Emacs, in the same co-editing session. In this paper, we focus on technical issues in designing and implementing heterogeneous co-editors in general and CoVim+CoEmacs in particular. We have motivated this work by potential usage benefits of heterogeneous co-editing systems and used working scenarios under the CoVim+CoEmacs prototype to illustrate some novel usages and inner workings of such systems, but left systematic user studies on heterogeneous co-editing to future work. We hope the insights and experiences drawn from this work can not only contribute to advancing state-of-the-art collaborative system design and implementation, but also provide inspiration to future heterogeneous collaborative application system designers.

A semi-transparent selective undo algorithm for multi-user collaborative editors

“…COT [27] explicitly represents causal/concurrent/context relations between a variety of operations by context vector timestamps. The time com- 1) The position tie is usually broken by site identifiers. plexity of COT in handling undo operations is exponential in the number of operations in the history buffer.…”

“…Human-to-human collaboration is becoming more and more critical in modern highly dispersed organizations and teams. Computer-supported collaborative systems enable geographically separated people working together to achieve a common goal through computer networks [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. These systems provide strong technical supports for human-to-human collaboration [12][13][14][15].…”

Self‐compressing object sequence for consistency maintenance in co‐editors

“…One of the most popular human‐centered collaborative systems is real‐time collaborative editors (co‐editors). Co‐editors support geographically dispersed users to concurrently edit shared documents at the same time and see the users' updates instantly 16‐23 . By integrating collaborative editing and cloud file storage/sharing capabilities, 24,25 co‐editors, such as Google Docs, Microsoft Office , Overleaf , have attracted hundreds of millions of over the world.…”

“…Co-editors support geographically dispersed users to concurrently edit shared documents at the same time and see the users' updates instantly. [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] By integrating collaborative editing and cloud file storage/sharing capabilities, 24,25 co-editors, such as Google Docs * , Microsoft Office † , Overleaf ‡ , have attracted hundreds of millions of over the world. However, there are still a large number of editors on the Internet without collaborative editing capability, and the demand for co-editors is still huge.…”