Sharing a folder
There's no Share button in Plicine, because a vault is an ordinary folder and sharing is something folders already do. Put it in Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or iCloud, share it the way you'd share any folder there, and anyone with Plicine opens it as you did. This page covers what's particular to Plicine once you've done that.
What each person sees
Once Drive or Dropbox has caught up, everyone sees the same documents, the same add-on blocks and the same themes, because they're all files in the folder. Changes other people make appear on your screen as they arrive, without reloading.
What isn't shared is anyone's answer about running add-on blocks. The first time someone opens a document with an add-on block their computer hasn't seen, they get the panel described in Why a block asks before it runs, whether or not a colleague has already said yes on theirs. The same person on a second computer is asked again there.
That's on purpose: it stops one person's yes from running a program on someone else's computer. It does mean a team answers once per person for every add-on block and every update to one. Saying yes once for a whole company isn't possible yet.
Two people editing the same document
Plicine doesn't merge edits. When you save, it checks that the part you changed is still as it was when you opened it. If someone else's change landed first, your save is refused instead of overwriting theirs, and you're offered Discard mine and reload. Copy your text first if you want to keep it.
Whoever saves first wins, so in a folder several people work in at once, save little and often.
Conflicted copies
Now and then Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or iCloud can't decide between two versions of a file and keeps both, giving the second a name like "quote (1)" or "quote (conflicted copy)". Plicine recognises those names. The copy isn't listed as a second document: it shows in the sidebar under the document it belongs to, marked "Conflict".
Open the document and a bar across the top says "A conflicted copy was saved by your sync client", with three choices:
- Keep mine deletes the copy and leaves your document alone.
- Keep theirs puts the copy's text in place of yours, then deletes the copy.
- Open both opens the copy, which has the same bar and a way back, so you can read the two against each other before choosing.
The first two ask you to confirm and say exactly which file they'll delete. Nothing is merged, and nothing is deleted or replaced without that confirmation. If the document changes again while the bar is showing, Keep theirs is refused, so a late edit from someone else can't be lost to a choice you made before you saw it.
You can also settle it outside Plicine: delete or rename the copy in Finder or File Explorer and the bar goes with it.
The limits today
This is a first version. There's no side-by-side comparison of the two versions and no notice that a conflict happened beyond the bar and the row in the sidebar. A service that names its copies in a way Plicine doesn't know shows them as separate documents.
Add-on blocks and themes aren't signed by their makers yet, so only put them in a shared folder when they come from people you trust.
For technical readers: Sync, the lock file and the library lists the file names Plicine reads as conflicted copies, and covers blocks.lock and keeping one copy of a block for several vaults.