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1. Martin Kleppmann (martin@nondeterministic.computer)'s status on Friday, 10-Mar-2023 05:41:00 JST Martin Kleppmann

   The latest @inkandswitch project I’ve been involved with is Upwelling: an exploration of what a text editor might look like if it had both Google-Docs-style real-time collaboration and something like Git-style pull requests. https://www.inkandswitch.com/upwelling/

   • Martin Kleppmann (martin@nondeterministic.computer)'s status on Friday, 10-Mar-2023 05:40:55 JST Martin Kleppmann

     in reply to

     On a technical level this project takes CRDTs in an exciting new direction. Most CRDT research assumes concurrency is due to network delay. In Upwelling, concurrency also happens when users work on independent branches, and then merge them.

     Explicit branching/merging requires new APIs and new algorithms in the CRDT libraries (e.g. to highlight edits made since some earlier point in history). But CRDTs are an excellent foundation for these features because they track edit history anyway!

   • Martin Kleppmann (martin@nondeterministic.computer)'s status on Friday, 10-Mar-2023 05:40:58 JST Martin Kleppmann

     in reply to

     Version control is essential for software developers, but Git is only really suitable for plain text files. Users of WYSIWYG text editors, graphics software, spreadsheets, etc. don’t get the benefits of version control (diffing, branching, merging, viewing history, etc).

     Upwelling is a first step towards figuring out how we could build version control concepts into non-plain-text apps (in this case, a rich text editor) in a way that is usable but still powerful.

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.