Realtime editing

[outline]

Realtime editing

[tommoor]

Wouldn't it be easier to do realtime editing on the underlying markdown value as it's just plain text

I think that would likely come undone once you got into the details - doing OT on the Slate structure would allow keeping selection and cursor positions for example. Considering there is a wider effort in the Slate ecosystem to enable realtime it would be good to participate in that…

[tommoor]

@ShiroYacha If you put in a pr that exposes value and updates the editorValue internally when the prop changes I'd be happy to accept.

[tommoor]

The editor isn't designed for this usecase yet, you'd probably need to be able to show other users cursors too at a minimum. As it stands it would be relatively easy to allow though and a welcome improvement 😄

[ShiroYacha]

In my use-case, there are multiple editors in one screen (actually there might be another issue with the toolbar...) and the user should be able to get realtime update when the value of an editor is changed by another person. Further, if possible I would like to enable collaboration when an editor is in edit mode.

Now I'm doing it using the ref which is a extremly ugly hack... Something like:

    render() {

        if (this.editorRef.current && checkRemoteContent()) {
            const value = MarkdownSerializer.deserialize(this.state.remoteContent);
            this.editorRef.current.setState({ editorValue: value });
        }
        return (<Editor
            ...
            ref={this.editorRef}
            ... />);
    }

In this way, at least the updates will be in real-time, however, I haven't find a way to effectively merge the content of each user so you won't lose the cursor when an update arrives...

Ideally, if the editor exposes the value prop of the editor it would be pretty easy to inject the incoming content. To be more inline with the current structure, we can probably wrap a valueOverride prop that gets deserialized and overrides the editorValue state inside componentWillReceiveProps?

[jfrolich]

Wouldn't it be easier to do realtime editing on the underlying markdown value as it's just plain text? To me that seems way easier to implement server and client-side than mutations on the complex json document especially when merging different states. Additionally you can use well-known algorithms for this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation).

[jfrolich]

BTW if you are interested to contribute this back (or fork), I am really interested in this as well.

[ShiroYacha]

Hey, actually originally I just wanted a way to feed the editor value back from remote. I am not really doing real collaboration editing...The slate editor already has an issue open on this subject and has supported to some level OT check ianstormtaylor/slate#259. I am not sure if it will be easier to operate on markdown text as opposed to the slate objects..

[tommoor]

I'm closing this issue – the editor has been rebuilt to be based on Prosemirror, which makes adding realtime editing much easier through their plugins architecture. However the work to do so will not be included as part of this project.