Collaborative Text Editing Without CRDTs or OT

Collaborative Text Editing without CRDTs or OT Matthew Weidner | May 21st, 2025 Home | RSS Feed Keywords: text editing, server reconciliation, Articulated Collaborative text editing is arguably the hardest feature to implement in a collaborative app. Even if you use a central server and a fully general solution to optimistic local updates (server reconciliation), text editing in particular requires fancy algorithms - specifically, the core of a text-editing CRDT or OT. Or rather, that’s what I thought until recently. This blog post describes an alternative, straightforward approach to collaborative text editing, without Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) or Operational Transformation (OT). By making text editing flexible and easy to DIY, I hope that the approach will let you create rich collaborative apps that are challenging to build on top of a black-box CRDT/OT library. This post builds off of my previous post, Architectures for Central Server Collaboration, though I’ ... Read full article.