OK so i just want a good collaborative Markdown editor
- markdown etherpad
- markdown real-time collaborative editor
- canvas markdown editor
Looks like this is something Drutopia is going to have to provide.
In the running
Standard Notes Realtime Collaborative Markdown Editor (experimental)
The best option may be from leading LibreSaaS company Standard Notes, but their Realtime Collaborative Markdown Editor only exists as an experimental extension right now, and as they note the hosted version may only stay available to paying subscribers on their Extended plan.
Here’s an example:
The ‘Markdown’ aspect of it seems to be only in that it does highlighting of Markdown elements, but at least it’s not encouraging non-markdown markup.
It uses Chainpad and CodeMirror.
StackEdit
https://github.com/benweet/stackedit In-browser Markdown editor https://stackedit.io/ is close, but it relies on Google Drive for its real-time synchronization.
Defunct and/or Proprietary
- Seems something called Canvas made a splash a couple years ago, but does not seem to have been open sourced at all, and disappeared, leaving only its Medium-hosted blog up at blog.usecanvas.com while the usecanvas web site is gone. No post since 2016, not even a goodbye post, but its Apiary.io-hosted API is 404 not found. And again, never a link to so much as a single GitHub repository. Boo.
- Draftin.com, HackMD.io, Notion.so, and Bit.ai all came up (and are still operating!) but are also apparently proprietary, meaning that when they close down we’d be completely out of luck.
The future
- yjs markdown
- secure collaborative editing with markdown formatting
Update: The future in the present?
ProseMirror is the example i see most often as the best example of YJS, and it has Markdown: https://github.com/prosemirror/prosemirror-markdown#readme
On collaborative document editing (that is libre/free software and can be self-hosted) generally, this is getting way into the techy weeds but i think things implementing https://github.com/yjs/yjs/ is likely the future engine but an editor called Slate might be easier now.
A great overview of the underlying OT vs CRDT debate is here: https://www.tiny.cloud/blog/real-time-collaboration-ot-vs-crdt/
More notes from folks on OT, CRDT, Slate, YJS, automerge… https://www.gitmemory.com/issue/ianstormtaylor/slate/259/502225328
More: Response to “Real Differences between OT and CRDT for Co-Editors”
I should note i learned about yjs from Tag1, https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/deep-dive-real-time-collaborative-editing-solutions-tagteamtalk-001-0
Problems with Quill (one of the editors that uses YJS), https://medium.com/the-lead/why-we-moved-from-quill-to-slate-94f42aa54fec
Slate docs: https://docs.slatejs.org/
Way too long thread on Slate ultimately not using YJS: https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate/issues/259
Nonetheless YJS is actively discussing providing bindings for Slate: https://discuss.yjs.dev/t/slate-js-bindings/59/12
Discussion about having all this and awesome wiki interlinks for Holochain ecosystem, https://forum.holochain.org/t/holo-txt-collaborative-notes-editing-on-holochain/1554/18