Handling Disturbance and Awareness of Concurrent Updates in a Collaborative Editor

Abstract

When people work collaboratively on a shared document, they have two contradictory requirements on their editors that may affect the efficiency of their work. On the one hand, they would like to know what other people are currently doing on a particular part of the document. On the other hand, they would like to focus their attention on their own current work, with as little disturbance from the concurrent activities as possible. We present some features that help the user handle disturbance and awareness of concurrent updates. While collaboratively editing a shared document with other people, a user can create a focus region. The user can concentrate on the work in the region without being interfered with the concurrent updates of the other people. Occasionally, the user can preview the concurrent updates and select a number of these updates to be integrated into the local copy. We have implemented a collaborative editing subsystem in the GNU Emacs (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs) text editor with the described features.