Collaborative editing solution based on LSP

[Eldolfin]

Hello!

Over the past week, I've been working on a "collaborative editing solution," similar to IntelliJ's Code With Me or VSCode's Live Share.

The key difference is that I'm using the Language Server Protocol (LSP) to communicate with the editor, instead of relying on extensions. This approach allows for cross-editor sessions (and as far as I know, it's currently the only way to implement this feature for Helix).

The project consists of a client (which also acts as an LSP server) and a server, both written in Rust.

It's working in a demo environment, but in practice, it's still quite buggy due to the way different editors handle the protocol. I still need to iron out some issues.

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Here's the demo and repo: Demo & Repo

demo_nvim_hx_vscode.mp4

[structwafel]

This is super super cool!

[Eldolfin]

thanks! 😁

[hholst80]

@Eldolfin I am truly impressed by your innovative thinking and that you are able to execute on an idea to prototype quickly.

[Eldolfin]

Thanks for the kind word! keeps me motivated to continue the project

[balsoft]

This would be awesome, but as far as I can tell it's very difficult to fix the state mismatches due to the LSP protocol not being suited for this particular use-case, right?

[Eldolfin]

Exactly, I stopped working on this project because I was trying to fix two difficult problems at once:

1. Different editors don’t send TextDocumentSync messages in the same way (especially in Incremental mode), so even getting consistent behavior across clients was a challenge (see https://cv.eldolfin.top/codlab/why-its-complicated.html for more details)

2. Document syncing is a hard problem on its own: handling things like out-of-order edits, distinguishing between user input and remote inputs, and potentially needing CRDTs or similar techniques.

The project still demonstrates the core idea, and with enough work, I believe it could be made viable, but I eventually moved on to other projects after spending too long stuck trying to make it reliable.

[balsoft]

Thanks for the update!