Case study · Paperplane · 2019
Paperplane Collaborative Editor
The real-time editor behind a document tool for small teams, rebuilt so that nobody ever loses a sentence.
01
The problem
Paperplane's editor synced by sending whole-document snapshots. When two people typed at once, the last save won, and the support queue was dominated by one complaint: "my paragraph disappeared."
Remote cursors also lagged by a full second on slower connections, which made co-editing feel like a hazard rather than a feature.
02
The approach
- 01
Adopt a CRDT, not a patch
I moved the document model to Yjs so concurrent edits merge deterministically, then wrapped it in TipTap for a schema the design team could extend.
- 02
Presence that feels instant
Cursors and selections travel on a separate lightweight channel, rendered with transforms only, so a remote cursor never triggers layout.
- 03
Offline as a normal state
Edits persist to IndexedDB and merge on reconnect. A quiet status chip replaces the old blocking 'connection lost' modal.
- 04
Soak testing
A headless script put 250 simulated editors in a single document overnight, and the results fed straight into the CI pipeline.
03
The outcome
The new editor shipped to all customers behind a gradual rollout, and the 'disappeared paragraph' ticket category all but vanished.
- −92%
- lost-edit support tickets
- 2.1s → 0.7s
- time to first keystroke
- 250
- concurrent editors per document, soak-tested
04
The stack
- TypeScript
- TipTap
- Yjs
- WebSockets
- IndexedDB
- Jest