Jupyter Notebook now allows collaborative editing similar to Google Docs. We are going to talk about how we made Jupyter Notebook collaborative using the Yjs CRDT and about the opportunities, this opens up for extension authors of JupyterLab.
Collaborative editing - à la Google Docs - is one of the most requested features in JupyterLab since 2012. There have been many iterations on implementing this feature. In 2021, we finally culminated at a general purpose solution that was merged into JupyterLab.
The solution we agreed is based on the Yjs CRDT. In this talk we are going to give an overview of the past efforts and the solution we arrived on. We are also going to talk about our future plans that include features like versioning, commenting, and offline editing with JupyterLab.