Issues and Experiences in Building Heterogeneous Co-Editing Systems

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.