tiny essay editor

This is a simple collaborative Markdown editor built in React, with inline format preview and inline commenting.

It's built on automerge and automerge-repo for CRDT-based storage and sync. It uses Codemirror for markdown editing UI, and automerge-codemirror to connect to Codemirror.

Status

This app is primarily intended for internal use at Ink & Switch for editing essays, so there are some features that are specialized towards that use case. We don't plan to develop it into a general-purpose editor that anyone can use for anything. But of course, it can edit any Markdown document too. If you want to actually use this editor in earnest, you might want to fork it to build your own ideas.

Hopefully the code serves as a useful sample for building apps based on automerge-repo, automerge-codemirror, and React.

Usage

If you visit the root domain the app will make a new doc. Or you can hit the New button.
Once you have a doc, the URL will update with a doc ID. If you share that URL to another browser/device, it should sync live. Hold on to the URL if you want to come back to that doc!

Feature set

Edit Markdown with inline format preview
Write inline comments + replies
Live sync through Automerge
Save out .md file with a Download button
Typeset similarly to Ink & Switch essays

Run it

Setup the automerge-repo submodule

git submodule init
git submodule update --init --remote

Check out the version-control-project branch in the vendored automerge-repo. By default git checks out a detached HEAD so we need to manually switch to the branch.

cd src/vendor/vendored-automerge-repo
git checkout version-control-project

Install and build automerge-repo

pnpm install
pnpm build

Install dependencies for tiny-essay-editor and start the dev server

cd ../../..
yarn
yarn dev

To pull in subsequent updates for the submodule run:

git submodule update --remote --rebase

--remote ensures we are getting the latest changes
--rebase ensures that the changes are pulled into the checked out "version-control-branch" instead of checking out a detached HEAD

Dual deployment

This app is designed for normal webapp deployment as well as experimental deployment to an internal I&S platform. The code is almost entirely shared but there are two entry points: