Ethersync – Real-time Collaboration in Your Text Editor!

We'll introduce you to our project "Ethersync," a software and protocol for real-time collaboration. The goal is to make it feel like Etherpad, but for entire projects, on the local file system, and with Neovim, VS Code, or your other favorite text editors! We’ll talk about our vision, technical implementation, and the challenges we encountered along the way.

Collaborating with software like Etherpad or Hedgedoc feels a bit like magic: you can instantly see what others are typing. The downside is that you need to be online to access the content—since the document is on a server, it disappears as soon as you disconnect.

We’re working on an open-source software called "Ethersync" to bring real-time collaboration to the file system! We want to make it possible to write notes and documentation together, and we’re also considering use cases like pair programming—directly in Neovim, VS Code, or perhaps your favorite text editor soon. We’re following a "local-first" approach, ensuring you always have control over your data since it’s stored on your own hard drive.

In this talk, we’d like to explain our vision for this type of collaboration and show you our progress and current prototype. We’ll discuss some of the problems we’ve encountered and dive into the underlying technology (like Conflict-Free Replicating Data Types and Operational Transform).

Finally, we'll discuss how you can get involved: For example, we could use help developing plugins for more text editors! We'll go over the Ethersync protocol, and discuss how it could help interoperability between collaborative projects.