Show HN: CRDTs+WASM for local-first, collaborative note-taking in the browser | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: CRDTs+WASM for local-first, collaborative note-taking in the browser

fuzzynote.xyz

20 pointssambigeara15 comments

Hi HN! Author here.

A little while ago I shared the terminal based version of the project (https://github.com/Sambigeara/fuzzynote) with the community. I since got inspired, and disappeared into my loft for 9 months to work on leveraging the core logic for use in a WASM-based web client. So you can now sync your notes between your terminal and any reasonable modern browser (some early limitations in mobile)!

The project has (finally) reached MVP and is ready for use, and any feedback is very welcome.

(Direct link to app https://fuzzynote.app)

This is so cool :) I can't wait to use this. I was just describing something similar to a friend I was collaborating with recently, and actually uttered the words "hey you know, somebody should make ..." And here it is!

That is amazing! I hope it ticks some of the use-case boxes, and if it doesn't, I'd love to know what those boxes were

What CRDT library are you using? Or is this something new?

I built this one myself, it's an event log which is used to progressively build onto a secondary data structure (which is more closely tied to the client)

In your pricing list do you mean "TBA" instead of "TBC"? Or maybe it's just my english, then ignore me :)

Haha, good point - perhaps "TBA" would have been more appropriate here! Thanks. I've been so far more focused on getting MVP out, so haven't given a lot of thought to the specific pricing tiers yet, but I hope to get all that set up really soon (pending some profiling/feedback etc).

Not sure if I'm missing something, but this just looks like a text editor (with an extremely confusing UI). Why do you have to use the search input to add anything?

It also seems way to large for the functionality (2.6MB compressed)

I totally agree that the UX is basic and unclear at present. Lots to do on that front; on design, documentation and otherwise! Appreciate the feedback.

You don't have to search in order to add anything, though. Focusing on the (empty, or otherwise) search and pressing Enter will add an item below. Enter on any item will do the same. However, the text within the first search-group will be invisibly prepended to each line you add whilst it's filled. This is a method by which you can group notes via a common prefix. Also, each TAB-separated search group is applied to the result set individually! There's some stuff in the help popup that might make things a bit clearer.

The binary size is an unfortunate side-effect of golang's webassembly compilation sizes. I can't (yet) use tinygo as the compiler as I rely on some unsupported packages. The app will be progressive soon enough, to minimise downloads and optimise startup.

Edit: I should probably mention as well, that on top of the basic textual capabilities, the web app is managing all data syncing/merging/playback/collaboration, continually. The cloud infrastructure is very basic, namely there as plumbing to ship DB files to the appropriate places. All the heavy lifting is done locally! Incidentally, this paves the way for potential E2E encryption (the app is ready, the key management/distribution etc is the challenge here)

Did you implement CRDTs manually or depend on yjs?

Manually! The CRDT itself is an event log. The client state is built from a secondary data structure which replays from the log (the extent of the "replay" determined by how much data needs to be merged etc)

There is so much good work here, good job. Just curious, what pushed you to make this aside from the obvious usefulness of it? Was there something specific? Also, while making it, did you perhaps also use it to collab with others during the process? Thanks again

Thanks so much!

Honestly, this was a personal project that got a bit carried away. The initial iteration was just a simple terminal app that allowed me to fuzzy-search through a lot of my notes quickly, with the ability to store and access a plain text file against each. I was rsyncing to the cloud so I could access my data across different machines, but got frustrated at the lack of conflict resolution, so figured I'd build a mergable data structure and use that. It _then_ became annoying that I couldn't easily access my list on the go, and hence the web app was born.

I actually (amusingly) built this completely on my own, which certainly made things more challenging WRT testing the collaborative components. Have certainly had the opportunity to test it a bit (mostly for "life" things such as sharing shopping lists...) but hopefully opening up the MVP will get some more organic and extensive usage and the opportunity for some good feedback!

What's the worst edge case you're aware of that you're not handling?

Good question. It's probably not even an edge case (dependent on usage), but a limitation right now is that a unique "unit" of collaboration is a single item/line, so if two people update a line offline, the winning line will the most recently updated. I can imagine that would get pretty annoying pretty fast. Granular collaboration (updating per character rather than per line) is on the backlog, priority will be determined by feedback of course.

Another thing to solve is ever-growing data sets. I've tinkered with some mechanisms to combat this (namely compacting the CRDT event log based on a bunch of rules) but this is tricky and I'd prefer the app to mature a little before I implemented this. Also on the backlog! Lots to do for sure.

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