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5 points and 0 comments? IMO this looks like a very well researched project, not sure why it went under the radar.
Having trouble finding plugins … mousepad?
This reminds me of Floobits (started around 2013) that offered cross-editor collaboration using centralized servers. It had plugins for Emacs, Vim, Sublime, and others.
Zed also has interesting collaboration features -- editing + voice: https://zed.dev/docs/collaboration

In the early days, Zed's in-editor collaboration features were marketed as a key differentiator. I wonder how many Zed users have used these features on a sustained basis.

This is awesome! I've been working on something similar but focused on Obsidian called Relay [0].

I'm super inspired by this. We use yjs with a hub (y-sweet) and spoke topology but I've been meaning to check out Iroh and make the hub into a "super peer".

[0] https://relay.md

It warms my old heart when projects use the AGPL (or GPL) licence.

It's a "small" thing to do that tells me that you're not just waiting for VC but actually really care about your work and the world.

(I'm not saying that MIT or other similar licences are used exclusively by people that don't care, I understand that sometimes you just don't have the bandwidth)

Does Ethersync use CRDTs under the hood for conflict resolution, or does it implement a different approach to handle concurrent edits?
Fantastic. Finally, something that can be used outside the browser.

I hope there are plans to support more OS.

Interesting -- compatible with agentic systems? Collaborative editing with an AI?
So ,a glorified TMUX?
'missing complement to git' seems to be a great value proposition. However, I think it is still a long way for this to become an alternative to Google docs or overleaf in the context of projects e.g. hosted on gitlab. We have moved many collabotative projects with external partners to gitlab, but the pain point is always realtime collaboration. Having something like this integrates in gitlab's vs code based online editor with a decent integration with actual commit/merge logic would be a game changer in many projects trying to convince people to switch from SharePoint/Google drive to a git based workflow. The local first thing would be just the cherry on top of it all.
Much appreciate seeing the huge wave of new local-first libraries/tools !

Maybe someone can explain how this compares to other solutions like y.js or automerge ?

Gladly! Automerge on its own is just a library that makes local-first data structures possible.

Ethersync uses this library for a concrete purpose: Collaborating on local text files. We wrote editor plugins and a daemon that runs on your computer, to enable you to type in plaintext files/source code together, from the editors you already know.

Hope that clears things up a bit.

two people sit in front of same laptop: solved and for decades
I could see using this for creating ASCII art collaboratively.