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Show HN: Infinite horizontal arrays of text editors

zeminary.com

75 pointstsydenzhap44 comments

I made this app to write books chapter by chapter, while taking & browsing through temporary notes for each chapter.

The leftmost sidebar is the list of chapters. The sidebar to the right of that is the list of editors in the current chapter.

The UI & UX are a bit weird, but they have a basic logic to them.

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Reminds me of CQ2

https://cq2.co/blog/the-best-way-to-have-complex-discussions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40277547

Reminds me also of Andy Matuschak's "working notes" project.[0] This kind of UI feels very natural. I've often thought about how this kind of UI might work in a browser, e.g. wrt tabs/history.

[0] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes

I browsed that website for a few days about a year or two before writing this app a year ago. This app is kind of an inversion where the focus is not on reading but on writing.

This is immediately what I thought of too. I wish the notes would stack like in Andy's site

I thought of that, but then I realized you'd run out of space very quickly. Stacking links to the notes in the second sidebar is better. It's alot easier to browse & then jump between.

Fair enough! I really like the interface. Well done!

This is very cool. I had a very similar idea, although I was probably inspired by the same UX you've seen elsewhere.

I had already built an index cards app for Mac and iOS and it works really well for what it does, but the fixed size of the cards always bothered me since you're always limited vertically by the card, so I wanted to try a horizontally scrolling note editor like you have here.

I put together a quick prototype of the idea I came up last year. Here's a recording I did just now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V-kCD2aXcQ

Also inspired by Andy Matuschak's page. I've been meaning to work on it a bit more and get in the app store but have been busy with other projects.

We think similarly. I saw your other app. https://www.ussherpress.com/cardbuddy/ It's like a better version of my first offline web app. https://zeminary.com/matrix/app.html

Oh, that's really cool you have something similar there too. I like that you stay in edit mode as you navigate from note to note with the shortcuts. I think that's one of the things that makes Card Buddy work really well. I tried to make it feel like editing a spreadsheet. In the app, you can navigate to empty cells in the canvas using the arrow keys and then create a card on the spot by typing some text. It makes it super fast to fill in the board if you have a lot of thoughts you want to get down right away.

This is exactly how I want my UIs to look - it's like a breath of fresh air. And I love that I can run this from an html file held locally. I'm not going to be writing any books but I think this could work well for some of my note-taking workflows.

load, save and save as all cause JS errors like `window.showSaveFilePicker is not a function`. I am using Brave (Chrome compatible things tend to work in Brave).

Thanks. One thing I kept thinking while making this was, I don't want to create an MVP, I want to create the simplest & most complete way to learn how to do & then do powerful work.

It only works on Chrome & Edge. I haven't tested it on Firefox, Safari, etc.

This is so great. I'm already envisioning all the ways I can put this to use. The only way I could think to improve it is a desktop app, and maybe some fusion with Heynote style features or keyboard shortcuts. This could be so great for short-term local notes or long form writing. Good job!

Thanks. & here are some ideas. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43012478 & some more ideas. You can also work out an outline or timeline or table of characters & settings & objects in the editors to the right. You can also get your editors to write their overarching feedback & questions in the editors to the right. I also designed this for screenwriting so you can get more ideas by reading up on how screenwriters do their work. It's clunky to format to standards acceptable to the industry, but the industry standards seem pointless & counterproductive, so it's maybe good to be forced to focus on content over form.

About the second point. In Word, you can easily get feedback for specific paragraphs by just writing around or underneath those paragraphs, or for the whole by just writing in another document & keeping that document open in another window or in the same window. But you can't easily get feedback for specific chapters, & you can't do any of these things while easily keeping chapter-specific notes always in view. This among other reasons is why this app is maybe more powerful than Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Obsidian, etc. It balances notetaking & reflection & writing. Microsoft Word & Google Docs focus too much on writing, & have very little capability in the other 2. Obsidian focuses too much on notetaking, & has very little capability in the other 2. None of them integrate all 3.

About reflection. With Word, the moment you make changes to the document, all the stuff written to the side goes out of sync. So it's best just to write in sequence. So Word has no advantage there.

(I deleted what I wrote in that link. Here it is.) The leftmost editor is used to write the section (or chapter), & the rest are used to take notes for that section, or to keep old versions of that section as reference, or to work out different ways of writing a subsection, etc. (& this seems hubristic, but I think this app might actually be a watershed moment in UI & UX & software development history. There's nothing out there that lets you juggle contexts nearly as seamlessly. Microsoft Word & Obsidian have alot of lines of code & hours behind them, but in terms of how much they empower me to write & think, they're far inferior to this app. & if you look at the html, you'll see it's only 750 lines of code, of which only 670 lines are actually used. So it's also extremely maintainable & forkable.)

Looks interesting on my mobile firefox; will try on desktop.

Small nit: what does "PKM" stand for? I am guessing personal knowledge manager? Might want to clarify on first use. Thanks!

Yeah. Stuff like Obsidian. I think they focus too much on building knowledge bases. & that Microsoft Word focuses too little. This app, you just take whatever notes you need to get things done.

I like this very much.

Can it be run totally local to the disk?

Also, I am having trouble searching. I enter a term and hit enter and it just goes to a new line.

In terms of editors, find and replace functionality is very important, IMO.

Thanks for sharing!

For local-only functionality: Worked for me. In firefox, even!

I downloaded the html file and then ran it from my desktop. Functionality didn't seem to be changed by it.

I found that SEARCH returns the file # that the search pattern is in. Hope that helps.

You just type whatever, then the list underneath will filter out anything that doesn't have the search terms either in the title or text. You don't need to ENTER. You shouldn't ENTER.

Search & replace is very important. I'll implement that in the future.

It can be used on desktop as long as you have an internet connection. If you look at the source code you'll see it sources some CDN files. I'm planning on taking it totally offline.

I thought about it & decided against it. It'd be buggy, complicated, & undoable. People should just manually search & replace things. There's even a first level search to help people get started.

What's with matrix? https://zeminary.com/matrix/app.html

I made it to write one poem, & to learn how to code with HTML & CSS & JS. There's one kinda practical usecase though. You can take notes either freeform or of different types for each paragraph of an essay, where each column is maybe notes of the same type. But you have to constantly resize rows to accommodate changes in paragraph length. It's very clunky. The only reason I haven't deleted it is because my dad likes it. I can't imagine why anyone else would though. It used to have autoresize but it just created wasted space. But without it you have to scroll individual editors.

For comparison, Google Docs launched tabs in October of last year which is also for editing e.g. a chapter at a time:

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/15499791?hl=en

The most offensive part of Tabs to me:

> If you download or print from Google Docs, you'll only download or print the active tab. If you want to download or print all tabs at once, you can do it from Google Drive

This is multiple documents, barely/mildly organized. I have yet to see someone use these tabs at work though, so maybe everyone is rejecting them as poorly implemented organization. What am I missing about Tabs?

"document-based workflows" are a good idea[0] but I think this is a terrible execution of it.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20040625150625/https://www.edwar....

The hamfisted attempts to ram new features into docs/excel recently have made me wince. It's like (read: it's because) they're afraid to change the winning formula, so any new feature is buried in some submenu and is treated as a 2nd class citizen throughout. They then try to surface these new features via a suggestions pane which is doomed to irritate users because it feels like you're doing something complicated when you try and use it, and half the time it causes standard functionality to not work as you'd expect.

It's crazy to me, half the people on HN complain about Docs being stagnant and not adding enough new features, and then the other half complain about too many new features? It's like there's no winning.

FYI, tabs are not "buried in some submenu", they're shown on every new document. They're not "treated as a 2nd class citizen throughout", they're an obvious "1st class" feature.

Tabs are great for simple, project doc stuff like separating long running actions lists from meeting notes

"Offensive" seems a bit harsh, no?

It's the same concept as tabs in Sheets/Excel, which I've never heard anybody complain about. It's a nice UX to be able to focus on one thing rather than deal with scrolling. E.g. one tab for agenda items, another for meeting notes, another for action items assigned to people.

But also for things like chapters, where a document is just too long for scrolling otherwise.

And the reality is that probably 99% of Docs never get printed or downloaded/converted. If an org uses Google, everything usually just stays a Doc, except occasionally when dealing with external folks. (I do find it a bit weird that you have to go to Drive to print/convert all tabs at once, but it's not exactly difficult. Still, I hope that will get fixed at some point.)

What a very novel UI! I like it a lot! It makes a lot of sense for people to cascade files left to right, especially when people have more widescreen monitors.

Thanks man. Tell your friends about it if you can. Doesn't seem like it's getting alot of traction on this website.

I really like the way the toolbar pops up when you select text.

Thanks. Yeah, I especially like how it saves space & makes for a very calm & uncluttered UI.

It kind of works on Firefox Android. I can't use m to move windows and there is no shift key but the core functionality works.

I don't see an obvious undo button, but upon switching to a keyboard with ctrl (I'm on mobile currently) ctrl-Z does it.

Yeah, it's not meant to be used on mobile. The way it's designed makes it basically desktop only.

Also, the undo only works within editors. It doesn't work across editors. It takes some time getting used to, but I think this way is actually better. I was frequently alternating between taking notes & writing the chapter, & I didn't want to have to undo the work on my chapter in the process of undoing the work on my notes. So I just took out the global undo. It reduced LoC by alot & improved UX.

Neat! Almost reminds me of the Acme editor.

How does this compare to the sibling project https://zeminary.com/matrix/app.html?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43012397

It was an experiment. I realized it was too clunky, but I also realized that it would've worked really well as just a single row. It took alot of thinking to realize that though. I spent a lot of time imagining more complex systems before realizing that a single row worked best. I imagined things like a kanban for writing but with twists, with inspirations from Gingko. https://gingkowriter.com/

Really cool, any chance you will release the source code?

Also what to m and d do?

click-and-drag m to move, d to delete (after confirmation)

I'll make a Github in a few days after I clean up the source code.

This is going to be incredibly useful for a lot of people!

Thanks. Spread the good word.

awesome

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