When someone else is editing the same note as you, you see them: a cursor, a selection and a name, moving as they type. This works between the devices you own and, in a shared vault, between you and the people you share it with.
What you see
- A remote cursor. A thin coloured bar where the other person’s caret is, with their name in a small label beside it. The label is always there, so a colour is never the only thing telling you who is where.
- A remote selection. The text they have selected, highlighted in their colour.
- The Who’s here tab. The right panel has a Who’s here tab listing everyone editing the open note, one row each with their name and their colour. It is empty, and shows a short notice, when you are alone.
The colour is a recognition aid: a stable colour per person, chosen on your own device, so the same person keeps the same colour and you can tell two people apart at a glance. It is not an identity and it proves nothing.
Jump to someone
Click a row in Who’s here to move your view to that person’s cursor. It jumps once and stays put: it does not lock your view to theirs, so you can keep reading or writing where you choose.
On a phone
The phone shows the same thing in its own chrome rather than in a side panel. When someone else is in the note you have open, a small chip with a count appears in the editor’s top bar. Tap it to open the same list the Who’s here tab shows on a computer: one row per person, with their name and their colour. Tap a row to jump to that person’s cursor once. When you are the only one in the note the chip is not there at all, so the bar is unchanged, and a jump to someone whose caret Myne has not heard a position for yet leaves your view where it is rather than moving it somewhere arbitrary.
Two things about presence differ from a computer, and both follow from a phone being able to be put away mid-sentence. Backgrounding Myne ends the list on this device at once and stops this phone reporting where your caret is. The other devices are not told you left, so they can keep showing your last position until their own connection to the live stream ends, and bringing Myne back puts you in the list again. Locking the vault clears the list on this device at once. Neither affects the note’s content, which is saved as it always is.
A phone saves when you leave a note rather than as you type, so someone else’s edit can arrive while yours is still unsaved. Myne places their change around your text. In the rare case it cannot, it reloads the note with their change and keeps your unsaved text as a separate copy beside it, and says so on screen, so neither version is lost.
When the note is saved
Presence is live and short-lived. Cursors and selections are sealed end to end and relayed through your sync server, which sees the frames pass but can never read them; they are never stored, and never written to your vault or a backup. What is saved is the note itself, and it is the only thing that is kept: a computer saves as you type, and a phone saves when you leave the note or put the app away. If a connection drops for a moment, the cursors fade after a short pause and come back when the connection does; the note’s content is unaffected either way.
What a name means
A name beside a participant is a label Myne works out on your own device, from what this vault knows about the device a frame came from, rather than a name taken on trust from the frame itself. Where Myne can tie that device to a member of this vault, the label is that member’s name. Where it cannot, it falls back to the device’s own name, and to a short code when the device has no name either.
That name is a label rather than a proof of authorship. A device is labelled with the member it is recorded as belonging to, and that record is signed by that member, so another member cannot record your name against a device of their own. It still does not tell you who typed a given change: the label resolves a device to a name, and it does not vouch that the person was at the keyboard. Nothing a peer signs about itself is part of this release either, so the name is a well-founded hint about who is here, not evidence about who wrote what.
Limits
- Presence is ephemeral. Cursors, selections and the Who’s here list exist only while the note is open and a connection is live. Nothing about them is stored, synced or backed up, and they cannot be recovered later.
- A colour is not a security identity. The colour is a stable, device-chosen recognition aid. It is not cryptographic and it proves nothing about who a person is; do not read access or trust into a colour.
- A name label is a label, not a proof. The name is resolved from Myne’s own record of what a device is, not from a signature over the edit. It names the member the device is recorded as belonging to, and it does not prove who typed a given change. It reaches the people already editing the note and no one else. Treat it as a well-founded hint about who is here, not as evidence about who wrote what.
- Live collaboration needs sync and the note open. It works between enrolled devices of a vault, and only while someone has the note open. Editing the same note from two places without a live connection still converges, but through the ordinary sync path rather than in real time. On a phone the window is narrower still: presence ends when the app is backgrounded, because a phone stops running in the background and Myne does not claim otherwise.
- What the server sees. The room the edits travel through is addressed by an opaque, per-note identifier the server cannot reverse to a note, and the frames are sealed so the server reads no note text, no cursor and no name. What it can observe is that a vault has active editing, how many notes are being edited at once and roughly when, and in a shared vault who tends to edit alongside whom, which is part of the sync exposure described in How sync works.
- Not on the web client, deliberately. Presence is delivered to the installed desktop and mobile clients, which both show a peer’s cursor and offer a way to jump to it. The browser client edits the same notes and syncs them, and it does open a live session for the note on screen so your own devices converge faster, but it does not yet show live cursors and it offers no list of who is here. That is a deliberate split rather than an oversight: the browser client keeps the live session and omits the cursor plane.