Show HN: Reproof – A non-linear writing app for perfectionists

Hey HN! I've written more words on the internet than I could count, for everyone from Zapier to Wirecutter. And for years it's bugged me that nearly every writing app still treats the writing surface as a linear sheet of paper, with paragraphs one after another and no space for experimentation.

And so I and a friend build Reproof.app as what I've taken to calling a writing app for perfectionists.

It's built around paragraph versions. You can add new versions to any paragraphs and swap between them to see how the different takes read in context. You can cut a paragraph as a clipping to save it for later. It’s a writing app that lets you experiment without losing any of your ideas along the way.

It took four complete rewrites before we finally found an approach that worked well (don’t reinvent the text editor, they say, yet we tried, and even with Tiptap it still was harder than it should have been). But it’s here. You can write and rewrite to your heart’s content in Reproof today, with writer-focused features like equal support for rich text and markdown (and HTML; you can copy in either format anytime), a command palette to keep your hands on the keyboard, side-by-side documents to have notes on one side and your document on the other, and a proofreading tool to catch things you might not other (with suggestions, but no AI rewriting, as I believe humans should still be doing their own writing, with AI as a sidekick to catch typos and other mistakes). And there’s a lot more coming.

Would love your feedback, if you have a chance to try it!