svelt-yjs VS peritext

There are also some great implementations based on Yjs like this one svelt-yjs I prefer Yjs to automerge

Excited to check this out!!

I’ve got experience with this stuff, count me in! Check out svelt-yjs[0]. It makes complex CRDT apps trivial. Websockets or P2P WebRTC in a few lines. I’ve got a live collab Svelte REPL using Monaco almost complete. It uses Postgres via Supabase for auth / row level security / saving and sharing Apps you make.

Heck, plug yjs into this Svelte based notion style block editor[1] and you’re more than halfway done in an evening.

[0] https://github.com/relm-us/svelt-yjs

Prompting GPT to do rich text editing.

Instead of replacing the entire document or selection, we want it to create diffs or operations for the minimal amount of edits as possible. This helps preserve intent better when merging the doc later on with OT/CRDTs. (Of course, you could also ask GPT to semantically merge docs for you haha).

So far, it's been harder than plain text or spreadsheets which have an easier position/coordinate system to work with: just line-col or row-col.

Rich text is usually stored as trees with json or html. Have seen a paper (https://www.inkandswitch.com/peritext/) that represents it as a flat array.

Difference in approach would then be: is it easier for gpt to work with diffs or with operations/tool calls?

This doesn’t appear to support rich text formatting ranges like bold, italic, etc - unless I’m missing something in the API. AFAIK Peritext is still the state of the art in rich text CRDT algorithms https://www.inkandswitch.com/peritext/

I’d love to see this build the rich text stuff from the Peritext algorithm.

The work Ink & Switch (unaffiliated) do has been an inspiration to my with regard to local-first and decentralized software: https://www.inkandswitch.com

They have a quasi-manifesto on local-first (https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/) and have published the best rich text CRDT around, Peritext: https://www.inkandswitch.com/peritext/

Lots of interesting work happening in this space.

Take a look at https://automerge.org/ and the stack those folks are building. You're exactly right that it's a difficult balance (specifically the trick is proving commutativity for the domain-specific data of your application). But automerge (and then https://github.com/inkandswitch/peritext) show it's at least possible. Good stuff.

Yes - The BFT problem only matters when you have Byzantine actors. But I think users deserve and expect the system to be reasonably well behaved and predictable in all situations. Anything publically writable, for example, needs BFT resilience. Or any video game.

As for the prosemirror problem, I assume you’re talking about weird merges from users putting markdown in a text crdt? You’re totally right - this is a problem. Text CRDTs treat documents as a simple sequence of characters. And that confuses a lot of structured formats. For example, if two users concurrently bold the same word, the system should see that users agree that it should be bolded. But if that “bold” intent is translated into “insert double asterisks here and here”, you end up with 4 asterisks before and after the text, and that confused markdown parsers. The problem is that a text crdt doesn’t understand markdown.

JSON editing has similar problems. I’ve heard of plenty of people over the years putting json text into a text crdt, only to find that when concurrent edits happen, the json grows parse errors. Eg if two users concurrently insert “a” and “b” into an empty list. The result is [“a””b”] which can’t be parsed.

The answer to both of these problems is to use CRDTs which understand the shape of your data structure. Eg, use a json OT/crdt system for json data (like sharedb or automerge). Likewise, if the user is editing rich text in prosemirror then you want a rich text crdt like peritext. Rich text CRDTs add the concept of annotations - so if two users bold overlapping regions of text, the crdt understands that the result should be that the entire region is bolded. And that can be translated back to markdown if you want.

The ink & switch people did a great write up of how this sort of crdt works here: https://www.inkandswitch.com/peritext/

> I'm looking out for practical CRDT ideas that works well with richtext.

Have you seen Peritext from Ink & Switch? https://www.inkandswitch.com/peritext/ It's relatively new, but is a CRDT aimed at rich text!

To put it in a different perspective, plain text editing has well-solved CRDT patterns. But, semantic data-structures like rich-text or syntax trees is what's tricky and has unsolved challenges.

Peritext[1] is the only one that came close to solving rich-text, but even that one left out important aspect of rich-text editing like handling list & table operations as "work to be done later".

For people interested on why it's difficult to build CRDTs for richtext, here's a piece I wrote a year back: https://writer.zohopublic.com/writer/published/grcwy5c699d67...

Related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29433896

[1] https://github.com/inkandswitch/peritext

Anyone unsure of what a CRDT is, this is the perfect intro: https://www.inkandswitch.com/peritext/

The two most widely used CRDT implementations (combining JSON like general purpose types and rich text editing types) are:

- Automerge https://github.com/automerge/automerge

- Yjs https://github.com/yjs/yjs