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https://github.com/hackergrrl/hyperpad

:bamboo: A peer-to-peer collaborative text editor for people and their communities.
https://github.com/hackergrrl/hyperpad

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:bamboo: A peer-to-peer collaborative text editor for people and their communities.

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README 

        
# hyperpad



> A peer-to-peer collaborative text editor for humans and communities.



## What is it?



Hyperpad is a free, open source, peer-to-peer text editor for people and their

communities. Authors control who gets access, and data is hosted by the peers

who are interested in it.



## Current Status



I've paused work on the web client in favour of building out an Electron-based

native client, [hyperpad-desktop](https://github.com/noffle/hyperpad-desktop).

This lets me dodge some difficult problems around web tech (indexed-db

performance; webrtc) and focus on making the core

[hyper-string](https://github.com/noffle/hyper-string) primitive robust and

durable.



## Why another collaborative editor?



Some of the most popular collaborative document editors today include [Google

Docs](https://www.google.com/docs/about/) and [Etherpad](http://etherpad.org/).



Google Docs gets the fundamental piece right: real-time text editing. However,

all of your data is stored by and readable by Google, Inc. It is closed source

proprietary software.



Etherpad takes this a step further in multiple directions: it is [open

source](https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite), and can be deployed by anyone

on any server. This lets any individual or group run etherpad and keep ownership

and privacy to their data.



Etherpad is most of the way there, but Hyperpad goes the rest of the way in two

crucial aspects:



### 1. No servers required



In peer-to-peer networks, all users are equal.



Nobody needs the monetary resources and technical know-how to run a server.



Unlike centralized services, you own each pad you create. Turn on encryption,

and your data becomes unreadable to anyone but those you grant access to. There

are no service providers to go out of business and lose your data.



Everything is client-side HTML and Javascript: you can just save the Hyperpad

website and run it locally on your computer, and it will function just fine!



### 2. Works great offline



Not everybody in the world is online. Among those who are, many do not have

consistent, broadband connections. People-respecting software must work

excellently offline; no exceptions.



Forgetting this is the *The Silicon Valley Privilege* (TODO: link to article).



Hyperpad uses an *eventually consistent* data structure called

[hyperlog](https://github.com/mafintosh/hyperlog), which operates happily

offline and will sync with other users whenever a network connection is

available.



## How does it work?



Hyperpad relies on the browser itself for storing documents, and powerful

peer-to-peer primitives like

[WebRTC](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/API/WebRTC) and

[hyperlog](https://github.com/mafintosh/hyperlog) to organize and transfer

documents to those with access.



The act of having a document open in your browser immediately lets a user act

as a host for that document's data, sharing it in real-time with others with

others. In the case that a user is offline, they can still freely make edits

locally, which will propagate to others storing the document when they

re-establish a network connection.



Hyperpad is built in a modular fashion atop a set of do-one-thing-well modules:



- [hyper-textarea](https://github.com/noffle/hyper-textarea): back a textarea

  with a hyper-string for conflict-free p2p replication

- [hyper-string](https://github.com/noffle/hyper-string): a conflict-free p2p

  string data structure

- [textarea-op-stream](https://github.com/noffle/textarea-op-stream): readable

  stream of a textarea's inserts and deletes

- lots of great modules from [mafintosh](https://github.com/mafintosh/):

  [hyperlog](https://github.com/mafintosh/hyperlog),

  [signalhub](https://github.com/mafintosh/signalhub), and others!



## Coming Soon(tm)



- [hyperpad-desktop](https://github.com/noffle/hyperpad-desktop)

- ~Faster operations (batching in the `hyper-string` layer)~

- Encryption (with separate read/write privileges)

- Secure app delivery (maybe [hyperboot](https://github.com/substack/hyperboot))



## License



[ISC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license)