Philpax: Teamtype - multiplayer mode for your text editor – towards a Collaborative Editing Protocol

Notes · Talks · Other People · FOSDEM 2026 · Teamtype - multiplayer mode for your text editor – towards a Collaborative Editing Protocol

2026-02-01T12:22:51+00:00 · updated 2026-03-01T21:19:02+00:00

Two parts:
- Tool we've built over the last two years
- Pitching on what you can do
Inspired by etherpad
Also wanted to code together, but wanted to avoid being bound to one editor
TeamType is an open-source tool + protocol for editing local files together
AGPLv3
Funded by NLnet and Prototype Fund; used to be called EtherSync
Demo works as expected
Need to avoid the NxM problem somehow; want to dsomething like what the LSP did for langugae support/DAP/MCP
Would be really nice to have a collaborative editing protocol
What is the technical foundation for this?
- Already have something similar for TeamType
- Custom JSON-RPC protocol
  - Current prototype
  - Sending open/close/edits over protocol
  - Based on operational transforms; the editor does not do much work, the daemon does all of the work
  - Currently several implementations
- Inspired by LSP
- Maybe Braid, HTTP?
- Please reach out if more ideas available
Live-preview sync with Hedgedoc is possible
Open problems:
- Undo
- IDE-initiated connections
- Notifying an editor of file deletion
Theoretically possible to use LSP, but it's really not intended for this
Braid: WIP standard for sync over HTTP