{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/collaborative-text-editing-with-eg-walker","title":"Collaborative Text Editing with Eg-walker: Better, Faster, Smaller","arxiv_id":"2409.14252","date":"2024-09-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Joseph Gentle","Martin Kleppmann"],"abstract":"Collaborative text editing algorithms allow several users to concurrently modify a text file, and automatically merge concurrent edits into a consistent state. Existing algorithms fall in two categories: Operational Transformation (OT) algorithms are slow to merge files that have diverged substantially due to offline editing; CRDTs are slow to load and consume a lot of memory. We introduce Eg-walker, a collaboration algorithm for text that avoids these weaknesses. Compared to existing CRDTs, it consumes an order of magnitude less memory in the steady state, and loading a document from disk is orders of magnitude faster. Compared to OT, merging long-running branches is orders of magnitude faster. In the worst case, the merging performance of Eg-walker is comparable with existing CRDT algorithms. Eg-walker can be used everywhere CRDTs are used, including peer-to-peer systems without a central server. By offering performance that is competitive with centralised algorithms, our result paves the way towards the widespread adoption of peer-to-peer collaboration software.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.14252v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14252v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"collaborative-text-editing-with-eg-walker","repo_url":"https://github.com/josephg/eg-walker-reference","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"collaborative-text-editing-with-eg-walker","repo_url":"https://github.com/josephg/egwalker-paper","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}