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 chronicle
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:
src/main.tsx
is the normal app entry pointsrc/index.ts
is an experimental entry point which just exports some functions to a host environment