Show HN: Opbox – CRDT based sync for text files on disk(opbox.dev)
opbox.dev
Show HN: Opbox – CRDT based sync for text files on disk
https://www.opbox.dev/
5 comments
This is super cool!
This seems super useful for pairing and multiple machine work.
Honestly I wish something like this could replace git, but my guess is you’d need to build specialized editors for this. In the direction of: https://www.inkandswitch.com/upwelling/
I was wondering if I could use this for multiple processes (codex, nvim) on the same machine, but then I realized this use case is unnecessary (brain fart).
This seems super useful for pairing and multiple machine work.
Honestly I wish something like this could replace git, but my guess is you’d need to build specialized editors for this. In the direction of: https://www.inkandswitch.com/upwelling/
I was wondering if I could use this for multiple processes (codex, nvim) on the same machine, but then I realized this use case is unnecessary (brain fart).
> I was wondering if I could use this for multiple processes (codex, nvim) on the same machine
Could be useful for time-travel I suppose (in the same sense that git is, even if the repo only exists machine local). Right now that isn't very developed in opbox, other than the ability to clone an existing workspace at a particular historical moment (ob clone --as-of "2026-07-03T22:00:00-07:00"), but could be neat to "rewind" a workspace to any prior save state automatically.
Could be useful for time-travel I suppose (in the same sense that git is, even if the repo only exists machine local). Right now that isn't very developed in opbox, other than the ability to clone an existing workspace at a particular historical moment (ob clone --as-of "2026-07-03T22:00:00-07:00"), but could be neat to "rewind" a workspace to any prior save state automatically.
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This started as a bit of an intellectual curiosity, to see if it was possible to do real-time sync at the filesystem level (i.e., in an editor-agnostic way).
The idea is pretty simple:
This has worked surprisingly well for sharing things like Obsidian graphs in real-time.
It’s most helpful in cases where you want the ability to edit local files from arbitrary editors, but still collaborate live. The experience is best from editors where you can configure an aggressive autosave policy, and where edits to an open file are reflected in the editor in a timely way.
To gain confidence in the correctness of the core opbox flows (particularly all the nuances around bidirectional sync) I invested in wiring up deterministic simulation testing using the turmoil library, which has been incredibly helpful (see the opbox-sim crate in the repo).