Collaborative text editing is to allow multiple users over a network to work on the same set of files simultaneously. In this paper, we present a collaborative file editing system that is based on the client-server architecture and uses a metadata management tool, called Repository in a Box, to handle the metadata of the files and users and to keep track of the consistency criteria. The primary goal of this work is to develop a simple but very practical way to support distributed multi-user file editing, a common task that we do everyday.