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Issues and Experiences in Building Heterogeneous Co-Editing Systems

Published: 05 December 2019 Publication History

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.

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 3, Issue GROUP
GROUP
December 2019
425 pages
EISSN:2573-0142
DOI:10.1145/3375021
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 05 December 2019
Published in PACMHCI Volume 3, Issue GROUP

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Author Tags

  1. collaborative editing
  2. computer-supported cooperative work
  3. operation transformation
  4. transparent adaptation

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  • (2022)Integrating Real-Time and Non-Real-Time Collaborative ProgrammingProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35675637:GROUP(1-19)Online publication date: 29-Dec-2022
  • (2022)Supporting Cross-Platform Real-Time Collaborative Programming: Architecture, Techniques, and Prototype SystemCollaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing10.1007/978-3-030-92638-0_8(124-143)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
  • (2022)Self‐compressing object sequence for consistency maintenance in co‐editorsSoftware: Practice and Experience10.1002/spe.309052:8(1802-1825)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2022
  • (2021)A semi-transparent selective undo algorithm for multi-user collaborative editorsFrontiers of Computer Science: Selected Publications from Chinese Universities10.1007/s11704-020-9518-x15:5Online publication date: 1-Oct-2021
  • (2020)Real Differences between OT and CRDT in Correctness and Complexity for Consistency Maintenance in Co-EditorsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33928254:CSCW1(1-30)Online publication date: 29-May-2020
  • (2020)Real Differences between OT and CRDT under a General Transformation Framework for Consistency Maintenance in Co-EditorsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33751864:GROUP(1-26)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2020

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