Hello, I’m looking for a simple collaborative text editor. We do have an office 365 subscription and it works, but the 10 minutes loading time every time you open a document are taking a strain on my mental sanity.
We don’t need nothing too fancy, markdown support would be a plus, especially with embedded latex formulas and possibly bibfile references.
The things I really need are a simple ways to add comments to text and a changes view to immediately see what a collaborator modified.
I’ve been taking a look at hackmd, it kind of fulfills the role, but the pricing is a bit high for the features available.
Could be self hosted too, but to be fair I’d rather not have to maintain it.
Gonna throw in EtherPad. It’s been like ten years, since I properly used it, but I believe, it’s relatively minimal, so pretty much just Markdown.
There’s also lots of publicly hosted instances you can use: https://scanner.etherpad.org/
HedgeDoc also seems like an option that could do some of this. Self-hostable and open source (last I checked).
I tried the hedgedoc demo.
As far as I can see it supports latex and has some change revision mechanism. Unfortunately no bib file support, but I guess that’s ok.
However, I can not find a way to add comments to the rendered text. Is that possible on the self hosted version?
That would be a deal breaker, most of what I need is actually reading documents written by other people and ask for clarifications or improvements.
I personally like Cryptpad. It can be self hosted, but you can also make an acount elsewhere considering you don’t want the hastle of maintaining.
Overleaf can be self hosted too
Nextcloud + collabora online works pretty good for me.
For plain text & Markdown, you don’t even need Collabora. Since 2019, NextCloud has a built-in collaborative text editor.
How about Git?
It is an option. However the ability to have comments on the text is really important.
And I don’t want to have through GitHub PR process to get that comments capabilities.
I would go for hedgedoc if the team can switch to markdown, otherwise Cryptpad to stay in an office-like suite.
If you already have nextcloud then that + collabora should be good enough. Otherwise installing the whole nextcloud suite just for collaborative editing seems like a lot imho.
If you’re looking for something hosted, ProtonDocs is fine, however you’ll need an account for each collaborator which could get expensive.
Lots of mentions of HedgeDoc, but it’s only for Markdown.
Collabora sounds more in line with what you’re looking for. Nextcloud Office might be a bit lacking.
Markdown is fine. I’ll take a look at protondocs, pricing is not really an issue - but since this is public money I very much prefer to spend it on actual experiments.
Don’t know about collabora, I had tried it a few years ago and found it very slow and finicky. Moreover maintaining the whole nextcloud setup would be something I’d gladly avoid.
I know proprietary but overleaf seems pretty good at this in my experience.
I believe overleaf is just for latex. While we do write in latex for publications, it is a bit too much for everyday documents.
in visual mode it’s quite indistinguishable from normal text editors with formatting
Years ago, we used to use Etherpad for that. Don’t know if that’s still a thing.
