The collaborative editing protocol is a work-in-progress draft of a protocol to unify collaborative editing across different tools. It is created initially by the authors of TeamType, HedgeDoc and Braid. The protocol is intended to define some fundamentals for creating other real-time collaborative tools or integrating others with it. The ultimate goal is to build protocol-compliant IDE plugins that allow interaction with supported tools that also implement the protocol server-side. This could for example allow an user to use VS Code for interacting with a HedgeDoc note or Braid document in the same way as editing a local file.