Show HN: Kraa – Writing App for Everything | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Kraa – Writing App for Everything

kraa.io

127 pointslevmiseri75 comments

Hello HN! We're a team of three building a new kind of web-based markdown editor.

There are many editors out there, so one is spoiled for choice, but Kraa's approach is a little different. It's trying to be both a minimal and distraction-free experience while being feature-rich and allowing for tons of use cases.

What Kraa's good for:

- Distraction-free writing & reading (minimal UI, performant, styling logic completely separated from the editing experience)

- Quick sharing of any written text – compared to many other writing tools, your content can be easily shared just by posting a link and giving 'read' or 'edit' access (we also have password-protection)

- Real-time chat / communities – Kraa has some unique features around real-time editing and our Chat widget allows for a frictionless chat experience. No send button.

- Kraa works well on mobile (though dedicated apps are planned)

---

Demo examples (all live, no login needed):

Blog article: https://kraa.io/kraa/examples/echolibrary

Long-form story: https://kraa.io/kraa/examples/insidekick

Magazine: https://kraa.io/weeklyinspiration

Kraa is built on top of ProseMirror (and TipTap) and Svelte.

You don’t need an account to try Kraa. We’d really appreciate your thoughts and feedback!

Open articleView on HN

After watching a bunch of people use the live chat, I am not discouraged by live chat anymore.

I actually think one can make it work, one simply needs to account for moderation and flooding upfront.

The first feature you need is a way to instantly ignore people who are ruining the collective experience. I would think when a person is ignored by a certain threshold of people, their content should automatically be moderated.

The second feature that’s needed is some sort of flood protection or detection. If a user is pasting or trying to flood the chat with characters, they should be instantly hidden and their content be subject to moderation. Being able to distinguish between copying and pasting on occasion and flooding goes a long way.

> The first feature you need is a way to instantly ignore people who are ruining the collective experience. I

Yeah, and we all know you're talking about Anon Pond Heron, lets be honest.

I am.

While I’m not the kind of person who races to test the most triggering racial slurs, I’m actually glad Anon Pond Heron did because I thought his behavior was informative, especially as you could watch him slowly type out the beginnings of a slur.

I actually think these types of CRDTs can be enhanced with a handful of simple mechanisms to ensure a higher quality chat experience.

The recently sunsetted Reddit public chat was a good example. They were tied to a subreddit, so only people with some shared interest came together. And the moderators could set an entry barrier based on karma. And you stood to lose your reddit account if you misbehaved in a public chat

I understand and appreciate Reddit’s approach.

On the other hand, I think there might be a way to solve this problem for live anonymous chat in a way that doesn’t rely on threats of “punishment” or “banning”.

I think most people looking at this problem don’t appreciate how much realtime information can be calculated from the event stream and how that information can be leveraged toward solving it in near realtime.

Why does people care if their Reddit account is banned? I've never understood this. Can't you just open a new one?

Replace “reddit” with “google” in your sentence. Now how does it sound?

Like you're talking about something completely different in function and purpose.

Not for quite a lot of people it isn’t, no.

I’m guessing you’re over 35 (as I am).

I know plenty of people in their 20s whose entire online life is centered on Reddit.

They make hundreds of comments a day. It’s where all of their social interaction is. it’s where they coordinate activities with people. It’s where they chat with people. it’s how they communicate with everyone.Losing that handle would be disastrous. You can’t just change it.

Intriguing.

But - the first thing I want to know it "how much" and then shortly after that I want to know "can I run it myself".

This should be the first and most important question anyone asks when trying a new product/service. If I don't understant the business model and how much I could be locked-in, I don't even bother wasting 1 minute on the product (I might tray that to get inspiration, but I probably wouldn't use that for anything serious).

> If I don't understant the business model and how much I could be locked-in, I don't even bother wasting 1 minute on the product

Personally I do it the other way around, first I try it out and see if it's useful, then I'd figure out if I'm willing to accept the tradeoffs of pricing/lock-in.

If you do it the way you suggest, wouldn't that mean you can't actually understand if the business model is fine because of the benefits you get? Seems backwards to me.

100% agree. Why even question the business model if that's not a product that I would use. First should be "Can I use it?"(meaning does it run on my devices etc.), then "Do I find it useful?" before anything else.

If I know the price is something I'd be willing to pay for a thing that is useful, I evaluate as such. If I know that it's a price I'd never pay, I still want to see what it is and try it because I'm curious. Don't hide information from me.

Example: enterprise licenses that are meant for a huge org rather than an individual let me know that I shouldn't get excited about a tool because it's not for me. Happens a lot because I'm very into networking and automation.

I mean, you can try the product, sure. And then decide depending on the price. But would invest time into a product that doesn't even a pricing page?

If they don't tell you the business model, then it's likely to be a bait and switch.

What you see now will always be free. In 2026 we will introduce a 'pro' tier that will increase storage space for media/images and additional advanced features.

No self-hosting planned for now.

Example of the real-real-time chat: https://kraa.io/hackernews

This went to hell fairly quickly

Everyone learns some important lessons the first time they allow user-generated content on the public internet, particularly if you're brave enough to allow so without any login :) It's a rite of passage at this point I think, lucky OP :)

I’m reminded, by the ascii art d’s, about a metric used in game dev where users can shape content, something to the effect of time to penis (TTP): defined as the time from tool availability to when users abuse said tool to craft dong.

Supposedly it’s pretty quick.

Really? IMO it went about as well as I expected given the audience.

I couldn't see the value of this application until I went on this link and saw the euphoria. Whatever this means, there's certainly a place for unfiltered, unmoderated "anonymous" chat. This is promising, but I still don't understand why it always had to end in penis.

Anyway, I liked this. Consider making sent messages as immutable, it's very distracting people editing old messages.

Shows a lot of confidence in their own service when they link to their "main" chatroom on another live chat provider.

Timestamp overlaps with the edge of messages on Safari 18.6 on MacOS 14.8.2.

I love this product immediately after typing something in it. For the foreseeable future, I'll be using it as my first choice when I want to jot down anything.

I've used products like Evernote and Notion before. Sometimes I just want to write down a fleeting idea, but other products are becoming increasingly cumbersome and slow to launch.

However, if I'm going to subscribe a plan for it, I'd like some extra features, such as direct voice recording then speech to text or the ability to sketch directly on my phone.

Your approach looks promising. One question: how do you handle conflict resolution at scale? ProseMirror's steps model helps, but once you mix in multiple cursors, mobile clients, and permission controls, things get complicated fast. If you've built extra abstractions or a custom syncing layer on top of ProseMirror, I'd be very interested in how you approached it.

Overall, impressive work - it’s refreshing to see an editor that aims for minimalism without sacrificing collaboration features. Bookmarking this to test on a few writing workflows.

This is intriguing, but honestly the first thought that came to my mind reading the home page was “jack of all trades, master of none”.

Take it as constructive criticism, but I didn’t learn why should I try over my current tools of choice.

In any case, best of lucks with it!

i don't get it. if i need to write a document, i'll still use google docs. if i want to write a blogpost, i'll use a blog hosting platform. if I want a wiki, i'll use a wiki platform

> It's not designed to be this or that

well then why am i using it

I love it. What little I tried it. First homepage is actually clear and obvious.

I was thinking of similar markdown editing experience, so I am happy you did this so I don't have to.

Name is a little bit weird, what is this supposed to mean?

Thanks! The whole app is raven-themed. "Kraa" is the sound a raven makes in many languages and is a reasonably short name. It's not anyhow deeper than that.

Is it a reference to "The Raven Scholar" as well? (A great novel!)

99% marketing 1% product Sorry…

Name one "writing app" that doesn't apply to? Still feel like you're being needlessly harsh, don't you remember writing your first text editor too? Most of us do it at one point or another.

I don't think the OP was trying to write "My First Text Editor". This is a product we're meant to consume and should be critiqued as such.

I'm not sure what exactly you're trying to say with this. That we need marketing to succeed? Or that the product has too much marketing (where?) and low quality?

This is damn awesome!

Edit: at first I thought it was too damn awesome, but then I noticed that my phone is overheating after just a few minutes watching the live chat.

Mine got laggy after refresh, however have to commend them for such slick UI

On the home page the "News article" and the "Food recipe" samples point to the same page.

Congrats! This was something I have not seen before. People loved it, apparently. Real time chat makes it so even with few users, there is so much happening. Unfortunately moderation could be a problem. Good luck with it. Gos bless you, my morning is a little bit happier now

- Click "Start Writing"

- Start typing, nothing happens

- Editor apparently didn't focus, I try clicking anywhere on the page to give text editor focus

- Editor doesn't focus when you click on it?

For being an experience "all about writing", I sure don't understand how to get started? I click in the middle of the page, but nothing is focusing? Using Firefox 145.0.1.

Using Safari (OSX). No problems.

Sorry to be doubting, but are you sure?

I got curious, and looked at the DOM, and seems the editor when empty is just one line of the full page, which if you click anywhere else (like what I did initially, in the middle of the page) the editor can't be focused. Are you sure you clicked in the middle of the page?

Looks like this for me: https://i.imgur.com/DOdiN4o.png

Unless you click that specific rectangle, the editor doesn't focus, isn't it the same in Safari?

This is embarrassing and a recent regression on the latest update. Thanks for the report, we will fix this.

Clicking on the line with the cursor worked for me.

I mean yes, of course. The point is that the rest of the 99% of the document isn't clickable...

Without sounding negative, i see a lot of bells and whistles

For UX it seems better to only show features when you need it. You're up against a physical notepad.

Maybe I'm not the target audience

Could you please expand on this? Showing only the features you need is pretty much what we tried to do. Keeping the writing UI minimal and distraction-free.

Apparently, Notion, Obsidian, Google Docs, Word, Notes, Reminders, Evernote, Bear, Typora, iA Writer, Ulysses, Standard Notes, Simplenote, Roam, LogSeq, Craft, Vim, Emacs and the hundreds other editors launched this week alone just weren't doing it. They were too cluttered. Too focused. Too specific in their use cases. Not online. Too offline.

Can't believe you missed notepad.exe(v1).

VSCode, IntelliJ, Eclipse...

Ed

teco (type every character over)

Building an editor is a rite of passage for the serial procrastinator

This comment is clever but adds literally nothing to the discussion. It had no spirit of curiosity, just contempt.

This comment is unfair to this specific product, but it does highlight how saturated this category is.

Pretty neat, good job! It doesn't seem to support Setext headings though unfortunately.

Beautiful. Is it E2E encrypted?

No, it is not. But that's high on the list of things we're focusing on.

Does it matter? They'll surely wouldn't implement a local/client-first E2E encryption, so in the end they'll be holding the keys anyways.

If you want something private, don't put it on other people's platforms, it's very simple.

> Does it matter? They'll surely wouldn't implement a local/client-first E2E encryption, so in the end they'll be holding the keys anyways

Yes it matters, there are use cases if not only for privacy focus people. Why would the hold the keys? I actually have found a good example of one that I am working to verify.

Because currently they have search and they do user-to-user messaging, good luck implementing that over the web in a reliable and scalable way with E2E encryption.

I'm not sure you understand the e2e encryption, the search can be ran on client side after decryption, there's no need to run it on the server side.

The chat is a bit more transient but you're transferring messages encrypted again over websocket for example, then decrypted on client.

I'm not seeing what the blocker is, or even issues with scale given its the client side doing the work.

Working example : http://securinote.com/#/notebook/bf528a8d-bf34-4f49-8cb9-e63...

key : embedding

Open up a second tab, make a change, check the network you'll see its sent over the wire encrpted via websocket.

I was looking for this too. shared one that was client side encrypted. No realtime chat though. SecuriNote.com

Loads slow on my gigabit fiber connection. But it looks nice

If I have to create an a/c to find out the price, then no.

It's free. And whatever you can use now will remain free. We will make sure to make this more obvious.

Our planned revenue is from a 'pro' tier that will have more storage space and potentially some advanced features and from selling short URLs (e.g. kraa.io/123).

The Food Recipe example link doesn't go to a food recipe :-(

My ideal writing experience is one where there is nothing in the way of writing.

For me, that means as close to hand-writing a manuscript as possible, without the pain of extended hours of pressing hard with a pen or pencil.

From there, I may want to share my writing, or not. If so, then I want the process of moving what I've written from the initial medium to online and publicly accessible to be as quick and painless as possible.

If not, then... I just want it to be a file. Something I can save, archive, move, or whatever, like any other file.

It sounds like, given my context, Kraa is not designed for me.

I am interested in hearing from people who feel like Kraa solves a problem for them. I'd like to understand the difference in creative environment!

From what you have written, it actually sounds like Kraa 'might' be for you.

> I want the process of moving what I've written from the initial medium to online and publicly accessible to be as quick and painless as possible. With Kraa this is a matter of one click.

> If not, then... I just want it to be a file. Something I can save, archive, move, or whatever, like any other file. And this is more nuanced, but Kraa isn't using any proprietary file system. You can export your leaves to .md any time. Though it's not the same as e.g. Obsidian where it is literally a local file.

> without the pain of extended hours of pressing hard with a pen or pencil.

Excuse me, do you have a minute to talk about fountain pens?

I recommend a Lamy Safari or Pilot Kakuno to start. If the nib is good, no pressure at all is required to write. You have to retrain to relax your hand and arm if you're used to ballpoints and graphite. High quality paper is not required but it can make a big difference too.

As far as digital, .txt will always have a special place in my hard drive. As long as a tool has a way to export into plaintext, I am not opposed to using it.

I'm definitely curious about fountain pens. I'm one of the few people I know that still writes in cursive.

And yeah, I still use .txt occasionally! Though mostly these days it's .md.

You are trying to make emacs?

nice work. i'm curious, what's the architecture for authorization?

self hosting when?

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