It would be interesting to know more about the end-goal if any.
Best of luck! I'll watch this.
My impression was that everyone uses their $EDITOR and integrates languages support via plugins. The only exception to this rule I know is Emacs (org mode). I really doubt a standalone md editor will get traction, no matter how good it is.
Market exists: Obsidian has 1M+ users, Typora is popular, iA Writer has a loyal following. These aren't VS Code users who wandered off — they're writers, PKM enthusiasts, and note-takers who find IDE-style editors overwhelming for prose.
Different audience: Developers might prefer VS Code + Markdown Preview Enhanced. But Ferrite targets people who want a focused writing tool, not a general-purpose editor that happens to support Markdown. Think "writing app" vs "code editor with Markdown support."
Native advantage: Most Markdown tools are Electron (Obsidian, Typora, Mark Text). Ferrite offers instant startup, lower RAM, and native performance — appeals to the "I want my tools to feel fast" crowd.
You might be right that it won't achieve mass adoption. But there's a niche for "Obsidian but native and lighter" that I think is underserved.
The currently offered feature list in Ferrite — code blocks, mermaid — suggests you are targeting developers or tech people here, hence, not really iA Writer... Typora — never heard of it, can't comment.
Anyway, thanks for seeing this as skepticism, and not criticism. With my comment, I tried to subtly suggest that there should be more to it, than an editor.
Regardless, good luck!
Target audience is probably "developers who take notes" rather than pure writers. The native performance angle is the differentiator, same niche as "I want Notion but faster" or "Obsidian but lighter."
(I'm not quite ready to do a Show HN yet, so please don't post it, but I'm ready for some early feedback if you'll indulge me)
People will go "what is this?", "huh, I’m not gonna make a user for this, can’t tell what it is". Those are my 2 cents.
Suggestion: have a non-login demo available on your website, and high-res screenshots/animed gif of the app in action on your Github repo.
- There's a heavy emphasis on performance. Are you sure customers care about that more than real time collaboration and self hosting? (I don't think they care about CRDTs.)
- If I am experiencing pain because eg my Notion wiki is too big and is having serious performance issues, what I want to hear immediately is how you are going to help me migrate from Notion to your solution. Notion has a feature to export an entire workspace; can you ingest that and get me spun up with your product?
- If I hear something is open source I expect to be able to try it out immediately without logging in. It looks like you can do that but when you hit "Get Started" it puts you into a registration flow.
- You might take a look at how Zed is marketing themselves, they have a similar pitch (performance + realtime collaboration). The first thing they try to show you is a video where they demo the product and show how fast it is. (I think they focus too much on performance though.)
- The frontend is a web app right? If possible rather than a video, embed the interface in your landing page. If possible, let them share their document and try out collaborating on it with someone or with another browser tab. Give them an opportunity to be impressed.
I respect anyone who posts their work. Best of luck.
> There's a heavy emphasis on performance. Are you sure customers care about that more than real time collaboration and self hosting?
- Good point, I'll find out
> Notion has a feature to export an entire workspace; can you ingest that and get me spun up with your product?
Yes, I'm almost done with this feature
> If I hear something is open source I expect to be able to try it out immediately without logging in. It looks like you can do that but when you hit "Get Started" it puts you into a registration flow.
I link to that elsewhere in the page: https://hyperclast.com/dev/ I'll look into making this more prominent.
> You might take a look at how Zed is marketing themselves
Thanks, will do
> embed the interface in your landing page
Great idea, I'll do that!
Anyways, just a counter-point to the commenter you were replying to.
Is it just Zed + Obsidian? A good knowledge base that scales well and uses plain markdown, but has the fancy multi edit stuff?
Obsidian and Zed are desktop apps, whereas Hyperclast is web-based. Obsidian isn't multi-player, and not really meant for teams.
I currently use Dendron in VS Code. Dendron is basically abandonware at this point because it couldn’t be monetized, but because it’s Apache licensed, I can fork it if I want, and continue to use it until something better comes along, or even modify it for my own needs.
It’s very hard to be successful financially in this space. Notion did it at the right time, but they are targeting enterprises who are willing to give their data to them, not individuals who want to run their own setup.
Maybe you can compete with Notion, but I’m not willing to put my stuff in a system that may not be around in a couple years, and I don’t have a license for.
However as others have said:
- A demo video would do a lot for your product.
- nit: Real-time markdown -> change to something that emphasizes collaboration/collaborative editing. For two reason - it's a much more familiar term in the space you are building and it's easier to understand (I think) for more people.
- A sample workspace (either public or a "starter workspace" that's available by default in a new account) that is non-trivial would be great to showcase your product. Look at obsidian using obsidian itself for it's own documentation site.
- Your about page is very well written - I wonder if you can pull up somethings from there onto the main page. https://hyperclast.com/about/
I didn't sign up yet however so can't provide more feedback.
https://github.com/hyperclast/workspace/blob/a7bfaa10821afb3...
Do you mind removing that? Thanks.
Open source purity is problematic. The OSI was established by the hyperscalers, who are decidedly not open source either.
Purely "OSI-approved open source" mandates having no non-commercial or non-compete clause, which means anyone can come in and bleed off profits and energy from the core contributors of open source projects. It prevents most forms of healthy companies from existing on top.
We shouldn't be allergic to making money with the software we write - life is finite and it's more sustainable over the long term to maintain software as a job.
The new "ethical source" / "fair source" licenses that have been popping up recently [1, 2] give customers 100% use of the code, but prevent competitors from coming in and stealing away the profits from running managed offerings, etc. (I wish Obsidian were this, but it's fully closed. Still, I do not admire them any less for this choice. We venerate plenty of closed creators - it's silly to hold software to a different standard.)
AWS profits hundreds of millions a quarter off of open source developed by companies thinking they were doing the right thing. AWS turned these into a proprietary managed solutions and gave nothing back to the authors. The original wind up withering and dying. AWS isn't giving back, they're just hoovering up.
Obsidian being closed means the core authors are hyper focused and can be compensated (even if it's not much). It's not like they can rug pull us - the files are text files, we can use old versions, and if they did piss us off I'm sure someone would write an open source version.
[1] https://fair.io/
The problem with FSL is that it hasn't been tested in the courts yet (afaik), so it's a bit of a gamble to think it'll just "work" if some asshole does try to clone your repo and sell your work. Maybe it's a decent gamble for a funded startup with in-house counsel, but if you're just one guy, imo keep stuff you want to sell closed-source, it's not that big of a deal. We've been doing just that since the 70s.
I love the idea of open source, but we shouldn't say that something is bad just because it's closed source.