[2305.00583] The Art of the Fugue: Minimizing Interleaving in Collaborative Text Editing

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arXiv:2305.00583 (cs)

[Submitted on 30 Apr 2023 (v1), last revised 21 Oct 2025 (this version, v3)]

Title:The Art of the Fugue: Minimizing Interleaving in Collaborative Text Editing

Authors:Matthew Weidner, Martin Kleppmann<br>View a PDF of the paper titled The Art of the Fugue: Minimizing Interleaving in Collaborative Text Editing, by Matthew Weidner and Martin Kleppmann

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Abstract:Most existing algorithms for replicated lists, which are widely used in collaborative text editors, suffer from a problem: when two users concurrently insert text at the same position in the document, the merged outcome may interleave the inserted text passages, resulting in corrupted and potentially unreadable text. The problem has gone unnoticed for decades, and it affects both CRDTs and Operational Transformation. This paper defines maximal non-interleaving, our new correctness property for replicated lists. We introduce two related CRDT algorithms, Fugue and FugueMax, and prove that FugueMax satisfies maximal non-interleaving. We also implement our algorithms and demonstrate that Fugue offers performance comparable to state-of-the-art CRDT libraries for text editing.

Comments:<br>16 pages, 10 figures

Subjects:

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS)

Cite as:<br>arXiv:2305.00583 [cs.DC]

(or<br>arXiv:2305.00583v3 [cs.DC] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.00583

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Journal reference:<br>IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, vol. 36, no. 11, pp. 2425-2437, Nov. 2025

Related DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2025.3611880

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DOI(s) linking to related resources

Submission history<br>From: Matthew Weidner [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Sun, 30 Apr 2023 21:27:34 UTC (306 KB)

[v2]<br>Fri, 17 Nov 2023 23:35:54 UTC (147 KB)

[v3]<br>Tue, 21 Oct 2025 02:42:30 UTC (356 KB)

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