Simple text editor has over 15k monthly users | Hacker News Reader

Simple text editor has over 15k monthly users

mytextarea.com

137 pointsent10190 comments

Started on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3631917

Follow-up a year later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6366724

You know it's fairly trivial to do this in html with a few lines of code... HTML Editable, save to local storage; pretty handy stuff.

Has anyone built a substantial one like this for their own use?

I wonder what people use this for as it is too simple -- in my opinion at least.

Use myTextarea

    to type plain text
    to remove markup from text
    to count words and characters

For the first two I usually do Win+R, paste, Ctrl+A, copy.

Try Ctrl+Shift+V instead of Ctrl+V for a “plain paste”

cmd-shift-v does this on Macs, as well.

I've found that this doesn't consistently work across applications (win 10), does anyone else here experience the same and/or have an idea why this is the case?

I thought it was something an application had to implement, but apparently it is a Windows function that applications have to enable. Definitely wish it was an OS-wide shortcut.

https://www.howtogeek.com/186723/ask-htg-how-can-i-paste-tex...

Pro tip: https://stevemiller.net/puretext/

yeah I do that with sublime text...

1) Notepad 2) Notepad 3) Word

offline trustworthy solutions for Windows And most of all I don't have to worry about losing control over the text.

The only benefit I see (if it is possible) is collaboration, but on a work-related environment why use a text instead of Google Docs (which I don't use either, but I see the benefit of audit trail)

Notepad2 does all of this.

I build a little scratchpad for personal use: https://sesh.github.io/scratchpad/

I guess for the most part these sort of things start off solving a personal problem. Getting 15k monthly users is very impressive!

Scratchpad looks pretty nice actually!

I love it! :D

> You know it's fairly trivial to do this in html with a few lines of code

If it wasn't then it wouldn't be a very good "world's simplest text editor", would it now? :P

Edit: It looks small enough that you could probably turn it into a bookmarklet so it wouldn't even need a server. Now that would be awesome.

If you want to save to local storage with a fancy WYSIWYG, here's an 18-line html file that calls the Trix CDN:

https://gist.github.com/bachmeil/7c19e72b9a5c49a85e8cecb0b7a...

Can't say I use it very often, but it was cool being able to do it in a few minutes even though I'm not a web developer.

Here's a free minimal text editor I wrote: https://www.writepad.xyz (or https://writepad.netlify.com)

Features:

- Works offline

- Autosaves to local storage

- Downloadable as PWA (Progressive Web App) on mobile

- Dark mode

That’s not the world’s simplest text editor.

This is:

  data:text/html, <html contenteditable>

That’s a working URL. Paste it into your browser. Bookmark it for later.

No distracting GUI. No superfluous features like “save” or “open”. Does not track active user statistics. Works offline.

Neat! So simple.

That's actually pretty awesome!

I don't think it counts if it can't actually edit text, i.e. open and save at minimum.

It’s a text editor. It can edit text just fine. If you need to do esoteric stuff like opening/saving you might as well install Visual Studio or something.

You can open and save. Just use the browser's save function, to save a local HTML file. (At least on my computer, this saves the text you put in, at least if you select the "complete" option when saving.) You can then recall that file just as easily.

Of course, it will only save as HTML and recall the same HTML file you saved in this way, and doesn't support plain text files. But, nevertheless, you can open and save.

You can even export as PDF and print

Just added this to my bookmarks bar. Super handy as a quick scratch pad.

If it's so good, how many monthly active users does it have?

Based on upvotes, at least 16. Once the current funding round is over we’ll have more time for user acquisition but right now we just want to deliver a solid MVP.

Time to throw some ads and analytics in there! Maybe even an autoplay video in there!

UI is too complicated for me to comprehend. I need 3 animated generic icons on a Bootstrap site to explain all the features

I'm going to need to upgrade it to an electron app so users can create and add plugins ... also some sort of signup/login system so they can receive useful update emails and monthly newsletters

And machine learning! ML makes everything better!

Does it run on DOS?

It is web scale!

What a lifehack!

Should I feel dumb about not quite understanding why this url works?

Not at all. It’s called a data URI, and most people will never have any reason to think about them. They’re mostly useful for inlining very small icons in CSS files as hexdumps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme

You often see these data URLs used with a different content type and more usually a base64 encoded blob, often an image.

Nah, my browser tells me it's insecure.

It depends on what you type in I guess...

Did you link to it? We don’t support being linked to, which admittedly is a concern for SEO down the road.

It works in Chrome, and Firefox claims to support data URIs when directly navigated to by the user. Are you on Edge? If it lets you override the warning you should be fine.

There’s no substitute for a thorough audit of course, but if you’re worried you’ve been MITM’ed the MD5 is:

  5ad110542ebf6a3fbae7840260b0bee5

> the MD5 is:

I giggled! ^_^

All it needs is a browser!

BTW didn't work in android FF.

Works for me on android firefox

Thanks! I tried again, and it is working. It was so simple (and no cursor until select), I thought it was just a blank screen.

What about cat example.txt?

No browser needed. No GUI. Works offline.

Surely that's simpler?

it's also not an editor.

Would cat >> example.txt be one, however?

Yes, and it is my preferred method of editing `.gitignore` files:

cat >> .gitignore

*.pyc

but you need the cat executable and CLI environment. Harder to do these days than double clicking on the browser icon.

I bookmarked this.. Can I open the URI in a new tab?

Hold ctrl (on Windows) or cmd (on Mac) when clicking the bookmark.

It’s actually tricky to open a data URI in a new window using JS, in a bookmarklet or elsewhere. Browsers block it because it can be a vector for phishing attacks.

No, ed(1) is the simplest and the standard text editor. And it has more than 16 users.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

The source code to ed(1) is substantially harder to memorize, and the mobile experience is sub-par. ed(1) may seem to have strong user metrics, but they’re artificially inflated by users who don’t know how to close it and thus have kept the same session open since the early 1970s, making it difficult to inform them of other options.

> the mobile experience is sub-par

To be fair, your editor’s tty experience is pretty much nonexistent. Tty is surely more important than mobile, don’t you think?!

Now, data:text/html, <textarea> at least works with w3m, but when I try to edit the textarea (surprise!) it just launches ed(1).

ed shines on movile on advanced usage, much more than any other editor.

https://xkcd.com/378/

Butterflies are actually pretty complex, especially relative to their usage as editors.

Ok, I've taken "world's simplest" out of the title, since it's baity and obviously editorialized (which breaks the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and leads to maybe not the optimally interesting discussion.

To those who want an automatic focus to the editable area after opening the bookmark:

    data:text/html, <html contenteditable><script>document.querySelector('html').focus()</script></html>

Why does it need to bloat to nearly twice the size for a simple feature? This is becoming Electron all over again.

That is actually very cool!

I personally use my own chat in Slack to take random notes, and of course it saves them, but I also cannot open it as easily.

that's quite cool actually!

It needs a browser which is a lot more hungry than notepad.exe

Agreed. When I consider the complexity of a piece of software, I always take into account the conceptual weight of all the stack behind it, down to ubiquitous basic constructs like primitive types, conditional operators, etc (but simple binary size can be an easier indicator).

Otherwise it's like saying that an application is simpler because its launch command name is shorter.

Even IE6 supported this, apparently

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att...

thank you.

Expanded a bit for a fancy title:

  data:text/html, <html contenteditable><head><title>InstaEdit

The corresponding .app-tld is available. Should help with VC.

For better obfuscation (competitors!), here is a base64 version:

  data:text/html;charset=utf-8;base64,PGh0bWwgY29udGVudGVkaXRhYmxlPjxoZWFkPjx0aXRsZT5JbnN0YUVkaXQ=

P.S.: Doesn't work on IE.

I use https://bigtextbox.com/ a lot, as a nicer way to leave a note in the browser than doing a Google search.

Interesting idea, but realised that I can't use undo/redo after pressing Tab (at least on FireFox); it immediately made the experience awkward and more complicated.

As I'm sitting here with my pencil, paper, and eraser ( some pencils come with erasers! ), I wonder what could be easier than this kind of text editor.

Huh. Pretty cool. I can't set a filename on firefox, but I like that the style is bigger than the actual markup.

"World's simplest text editor" sends 13 requests to a web server, including one to world's leading spyware company. No, thank you.

Exactly. I can't imagine why anyone would use a web site for drafting text, especially "temporary" drafts, which are probably more in need of privacy than the subsequent text that we publish / send out! What I do is have OneNote open all the time. It's blocked by the firewall from contacting the web and all notebooks are local. As an upside: if the temporary text turns into something substantial, you can use OneNote's organizing features to organize it, too. AKOO: Always Keep OneNote Open :-)

(Insert the usual discussion about org-mode here.) ;-)

World's simplest text editor is:

  $ cat > edited.txt

Enter text, hit ^D when you're done.

If you pray hard enough, Google will find a way to let you do that in a browser, so someone can count MAUs.

Yeah but can you edit text? You can only input it.

Readline and shell edit commands are a better text editor than simply cat.

   echo "Your text here edited as you want" > edited.txt

You are right of course, I was just aiming for the simplest possible editor. Would you agree that having support for backspace still just barely counts as editing?

Only in the same way as when you can write down 10^20 as 10+10+10+10+10+...

I use this site for utilising the browsers spell checker :)

Wow! How do you know it has over 15k monthly users?

It says so in the "Show info" section. Alexa stats check out too.

There seems to be Google Analytics in the source.

Now... is it ramen profitable?

Good question. It will only be a matter of time until you need a browser and an internet connection to blink your eye or take a breath. Google will be up your every orifice. I bet they'll find a way to make a profit from that.

Maybe they can convince and buy pro.be domain from the Belgian registry (who have marked it as "not available"). That way you could have a subdomain for every conceivable phenomenon, surface and orifice.

How does the author make any money... I see no ads

Given the amount of unused space in the toolbar I believe you can safely add some handy features without making it worse in any sense so even more people would appreciate it. I'd add regex search&replace (with support to add/replace newline and tab symbols) and codepage conversion (including support for decrypting wrong codepage text and encoding/decoding the selected text as a URL replacing non-latin symbols with their codes and vice versa).

Right now it does this one thing pretty well. Adding more features is not always the answer.

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