A bit more than four years ago I started the xi-editor project. Now I have placed it on the back burner (though there is still some activity from the open source community). The original goal was to deliver a very high quality editing experience. To this end, the project spent a rather large number of “novelty points”: Rust as the implementation language for the core. A rope data structure for text storage. A multiprocess architecture, with front-end and plug-ins each with their own process. Fully embracing async design. CRDT as a mechanism for concurrent modification. I still believe it would be possible to build a high quality editor based on the original design. But I also believe that this would be quite a complex system, and require significantly more work than necessary. I’ve written the CRDT part of this retrospective already, as a comment in response to a Github issue. That prompted good discussion on Hacker News. In this post, I will touch again on CRDT but will focus on the other aspects of the system…