Hacker News Reader

Comment by im_down_w_otp | Hacker News Reader

I would be very appreciative if Google made a stripped down version of Google Docs for plaintext editing.

There are a bunch of basic integration features that would also be fantastic, but if the product was literally just Google Docs, minus the WYSIWYG bits, and all plaintext w/ maybe some syntax highlighting thrown in, I'd be super happy.

View on HN

This looks like etherpad https://etherpad.org/

Not plain text only but probably can be configured for that.

No syntax highlighting.

That's basically what I'm trying to build - we're starting with Quill.js and ShareDB, adding extensions, configuring, and then adding a plugin system based on React, which can take arbitrary components all based on ShareDB sync (think spreadsheets, forms, but I'd also love to integrate the Pyiodide stuff to have runnable Python code inside a rich text document, etc). We built this as part of a synchronous collaborative learning platform, but I'm currently trying to extract the key components so that it can be a stand-alone open source library that others can help build on. Very early prototype: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@chilifrog/reactive-rich-text

> Google Docs, minus the WYSIWYG bits, and all plaintext w/ maybe some syntax highlighting thrown in

That is the subset of features you want. Everyone else wants a slightly different subset of features. Add all of those subsets together and you end up with the total feature set of Google Docs.

> Google Docs, minus the WYSIWYG bits, and all plaintext w/ maybe some syntax highlighting thrown in

And the feature creep begins. Eventually you'll be asking for a full blown IDE.

Google has actually already has an internal cloud-based IDE.

Which doesn't do real-time collaboration, and due to the way it's backing store works, likely never will.

Another product that should be mentioned here is OX Documents [1] by Open-Xchange. They have a web-based Office suite with MS file types (docx, xlsx, etc.) that has a collaboration feature. However, the product is not 100% Open-Source (CCSA:NC) [2]. The source code is accessible, but you are not allowed to use it in a commercial product.

IANAL, but if you want to use the product yourself (even as a company) that should be just fine, but you are neither allowed to host the product for someone else (commercially) nor to created a product based on their frontend code.

They also have a demo which you can try here:

https://gold.ox.io/admin-api/tryme/user/gold/assignment

[1] https://www.open-xchange.com/portfolio/ox-documents/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Xchange#Licensing

If all the clutter of an word-processor on the screen, is what bothers you - there's Zoho Writer (https://writer.zoho.com) that could help you.

The online word-processor provides contextual options without as much clutter as google docs.

If you're looking for a plaintext collaborative editor, then Quill and a bit of glue-code is all you need. I believe there's even example code that shows how to maintain the document on a server.

You mean like this? https://hackmd.io/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com