(2021-03-05) Litt Bring Your Own Client

Geoffrey Litt: Bring Your Own Client. For example, I can program with Sublime Text, while my teammate uses vim, and we don’t need to fight to the death to pick one editor between us. There are dozens of text editors to choose from, and no lock-in from proprietary file formats

Contrast this with Google Docs: in order to live collaborate with each other, we all need to use the same editor.

In cloud apps, the live collaboration logic is usually coupled to a specific editor; even if Google wanted to expose an API for editing Google Docs in third-party editors, it would probably be very challenging. The situation is nicer with text editors and git, because editing is decoupled from collaboration logic.

It seems like local-first software is a good foundation for promoting Bring Your Own Client more broadly. What would it look like to have a thriving ecosystem of third-party clients for Google Docs style word processing, which can all interoperate with each other, even supporting realtime collaboration?