Ask ROpenSci: I am building a real-time collaborative R Editor, what kind of feature would you want?

General Q&A
1

Hi All,

I recently built a google-doc like real-time collaborative editor called Escherpad. link here

Recently I decided to implement a real-time collaborative jupyter client, and it is working really really well for the iRKernel (Thanks Karthik and everyone else!).

So basically, I think I have two sides of the puzzle: I have a rich text editor that allow one to type WYSIWYG and collaborate at real-time, and a client-side kernel that allows one to run R interactively. What are the things I can build for you guys?

Specific things I’m thinking about include things that makes it easier for your students to get started with R, type homework and even work together.

Or a simple web page that allows one to convert R to jupyter notebooks.

Or a place where you can share your notes openly in the form of book-websites, and the viewer can play with those notes right there in the same page.

Best,
Ge

2 Likes
2

This looks super interesting! I’d love a beta invite.

Question: If the kernel is client-side, where are data files stored? Do collaborators need to have them on-disk?

Some features that would be useful:

  • Comment/highlighting feature
  • Conversion to/from knitr documents
3

Thanks for your post:

  • Sign in with Github would be nice - quick way to pull in gists or files from repos
  • Will have more feedback once I can try it out

p.s. The site looks good, but is pretty sluggish right now (I have a fast internet connection), and the http://www.escherpad.com/ doesn’t seem to resolve