Edit together, on a room you control.
Share a Varve document from the desktop app or your own room server. Changes replicate live; cursors, selections, and cursor chat show who is working where; and undo reverses only your own edits — never a collaborator's work. Your document stays local-first: joining a session never touches the file on your disk.
Ordered semantic operations, not a merge lottery.
Every committed edit travels as a validated, property-level change list — the same semantic capture Varve's history records. The room host orders operations; every participant applies the same sequence, so documents converge without last-write-wins whole-document overwrites. A change that fails validation resynchronizes visibly instead of silently dropping.
Undo that respects the room
In a shared session, undo reverses only what you did. If a teammate changed something after you, your undo skips it and says why instead of clobbering their work. Deleting restores from your own history; undoing a creation keeps the object if someone else has already built on it.
Presence that stays out of the way
Live cursors, remote selection outlines, and participant avatars are ephemeral by construction — they never enter your document, your history, or your saved files. Cursor chat opens with/, expires in seconds, and is never persisted anywhere.
Spotlight, with consent
Spotlight your view to walk teammates through the canvas. Following is opt-in per person and any local camera interaction cancels it — nobody's viewport moves without their own say-so.
Two hosting paths, one open implementation.
- Host on this device
- The desktop app runs a room server in-process on your machine. Sessions are reachable from other apps and browser tabs on the same computer — enough for pairing, review, and working across a browser and the desktop.
- Self-host a room server
- Run the standalone room server (a single binary with durable storage) wherever you like and point Varve at it. You own the data, the retention, and the network; TLS terminates at your reverse proxy. No Varve-operated service sits in the middle.
Honest boundaries: cross-machine sessions need a server you can reach (LAN or internet with your own TLS), the host cannot read your documents without a room you created, and collaboration is not end-to-end encrypted — the room server stores documents in plaintext by design.
Why local-first matters
Your file is the authority; a session is replication, not a takeover.