Automerge and Version Control for Rich Text

• Conference Talk by Alex Good about rich text in Automerge
• Given at the Local-First Conference (2024)

Notes

• Starts with a “what is Automerge”
• Text can be edited concurrently (usual CRDT stuff)
• Looks at a couple edge cases specific to rich text
  • e.g. how to merge overlapping markup
• Real world motivation: GoodNotes was adding Automerge & rich text
  • Must be interoperable with HTML, iOS APIs, etc (e.g. NSAttributeString)
• PeriText was straightforward, but block level elements needed more work
  • Blocks
    • Paragraphs, lists, blockquotes
    • Nestable
  • Formatting can cross block boundaries
• Demo showing editing
• Next up
  • More perfromance work
  • Better memory use (prototype with 100x improvement)
  • Sync improvements
  • New auth system

QUOTE

I think version control is an appealing model for a lot of local first software. I think it works well in scenarios where your users are both reading and writing, and your data is moving at human speeds and is human sized […] and it has to be good […] I think git has taught us that version control has to be difficult […] I think that building good tools with version control could be very compelling, and not just for text