A lightweight approach to transparent sharing of familiar single-user editors

Special-purpose group editors remain underused despite significant work over the past two decades.This paper proposes a novel approach to transparently adapting familiar single-user editors for group editing without modifying their source code. It only needs to adapt single-user editors to support two simple interfaces that get and set their states; edit scripts are derived between document states by diffing and concurrent scripts are merged on the fly. The approach is significantly less expensive than recent alternatives because it no longer needs to translate editing operations at the windows event level. The users are free to use any editing commands and even heterogeneous single-user editors can be used in the same group editing task. This work is part of a project called intelligent collaboration transparency (ICT).

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