Show HN: Minimalist editor that lives in browser, stores everything in the URL
github.comI wanted to see how far I could go building a notes app using only what modern browsers already provide – no frameworks, no storage APIs, no build step.
What it does:
Single HTML file, no deps, 111 loc
Notes live in the URL hash (shareable links!)
Auto-compressed with CompressionStream
Plain-text editor (contenteditable)
History support
Page title from first # heading
Respects light/dark mode
No storage, cookies, or tracking
The entire app is the page source.
https://textarea.my/ Funny how I made almost exactly the same but for maps. I needed a way to share a link to a map, with drawings and the ability for the receiver to see their own location on the map. Annotated screenshots solves the first but not the second. Vibe engineered this, with many of the same ideas as OP. Took an evening. Just in time apps for one specific use case is a thing. And because it's so cheap to make and can be hosted cheaply with no backend, it can be given away for free. https://nyman.re/mapdraw/#l=60.172108%2C24.941458&z=16&d=LU8... That is absolutely great!
Using it now to plan a trip. Could we also add text annotations? Also the delete button could delete just the last shape or a selected shape so as not to start over? > Vibe engineered While I'm all for vibe coding as appropriate, there's a lot of humor to be found it calling it engineering. :D Fair. Though it seems that half of engineering is just giving a respectable name to whatever actually works. For software, but that's a well trodden path at this point. I've seen a few projects that are actually "vibe engineering" outside of software on the 3d modeling side so the terms are confusing. This is so cool!! The responsiveness of the page is so much better than any maps app I have used. This is pretty cool! And if you are open to bug reports.. if I move around the drawings move smoothly with the map, but if I zoom in/out the drawings move only after the map zooming animation ends, rather than smoothly This is very cool! Is this open source? Was just working on something similar this morning. As an fyi you can avoid the string replacing in the base64 string by using `.toBase64({ alphabet: "base64url" })` and `fromBase64({ alphabet: "base64url"})`. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... Per the spec [0], a URL can hold at least 8,000 characters. > It is RECOMMENDED that all senders and recipients support, at a minimum, URIs with lengths of 8000 octets in protocol elements. Note that this implies some structures and on-wire representations (for example, the request line in HTTP/1.1) will necessarily be larger in some cases. Mainstream browsers support at least 64,000 characters [1], and Chrome supports up to 2MB [2]. [0]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110#section-4.1-5 [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/417184/ [2]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/s... Chrome limit is 2MB, Firefox is 1MB, WebKit is no limit. Here is the Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky: - https://medv.io/goto/crime-and-punishment-by-fyodor-dostoevs... This unfortunately immediately crashed my android firefox nightly browser. Amusingly it loaded the page, but one click on the address bar sent me straight to the home screen For what it's worth, there might be a 2GB limit on the iOS side. https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/... Incredible. My absolute favorite thing about modernity is how enabled we are to riff on a riff of a riff. In 1346, if a blacksmith came up with something cool, its quite possible that it died with them. Interesting, in Firefox mobile (actually fennec) if I tap the address bar, I get an empty text box. EDIT: actually I can edit the URL, but it takes a while to load. hmmm makes me wonder if you could train llms on gzipped text. would save a lot of tokens that way. Works fine on Win11 Edge LOL Tapping the address bar crashed my Chrome on mobile. loaded OK for me on mobile safari. Loaded fine for me too -- but like parent, tapping the address bar to share afterwards crashed it on Android here :) My Firefox on mobile seemingly handled it fine. I guess the surveillance industry has enough incentives to make this ever larger, so they can fit more utm-trackers, campaign-ids, referal trackers and whatnot in URLs. It's truly insane how large typical share-URLS for content on instagram, youtube or any other large platforms are. URLs that could've been example.com/t/some-large-enough-id?time=13337 are stuffed with hundreds of characters, just to gather more data on people using these links. > Per the spec [0], a URL can hold at least 8,000 characters. > It is RECOMMENDED that all senders and recipients support, at a minimum, URIs with lengths of 8000 octets in protocol elements. It is always worth remembering that, unless you have already ensured that the content has been rendered into a URI-safe subset of ASCII, a character and an octet are not the same thing. Very good point indeed. In the worst case scenario, you would only have 1/5th of that capacity I did something similar with a spreadsheet years ago. It's lkudgy, but it works. You have to tab away from the input box and refresh the page, iirc. https://gabrielsroka.github.io/webpages/calc.htm#a1:=Rate=3.... It's about 130 js loc I recently build a small framework to create JavaScript apps that use this kind of URL sharing and therefore don’t require a backend: https://github.com/grothkopp/lost.js I really like this from a privacy point of view. So much so that I'm thinking about adding a purely URL-storage solution as an option in my https://kraa.io editor. From a privacy point of view, you might not want to use textarea.my since it includes some tracking bits at the end: From a privacy point of view how is it any better than just using a local, native text editor? From purely privacy point of view it’s not. But if you also want markdown features, custom typography and easy sharing, this starts to make more sense. Why store in the URL and make it bloated? Isn't storing in local storage enough? I made something similar once, specifically targetted for guitar tablature https://tabviewer.app/
To make links shorter for sharing with others, I use a shortlink service. Pasting URLs of thousands of characters long can be problematic Wow funny I‘m just seeing this after posting my tab editor in another comment. I have the same use case as you :) shameless plug: i built something very similar but nobody cared: https://github.com/AlexW00/Buffertab Voice typing is a cool feature, have you considered whisper wasm instead of OpenAI api? Cool project, but loading "Crime and Punishment" crashed my mobile browser. I don't think urls were built for that kind of punishment. You claim no tracking, and yet there's a Cloudflare Web Analytics beacon placed at the bottom of the page (thankfully filtered out by uBlock Origin) Think you've inadvertently found a way to provide extra tests for mobile devices. The Crime and Punishment one consistently crashes Brave mobile for me. I assume it's the length of the URL - and seen another commentator say the same for chrome mobile (sure they both use the same codebase so likely an upstream issue). Nice! I made a similar thing but the html for the text editor fits in a data uri, so it can be a bookmark or new tab page for taking quick notes https://gist.github.com/smcllns/8b727361ce4cf55cbc017faaefbb... I like this because most of the time I need random stuff—numbers, quick searches, or ideas—and this helps instantly. I too built a one (text is stored in localstorage) I keep this in the bookmark bar for the times I need a place to paste a quick bit of text (but it doesn't persist): data:text/html, <html contenteditable> I have something tangentially similar here: https://jsgist.org If you click save you get the option to use a URL. The problem with a URL every edit is a new URL. So you send the URL to a friend, then fix a typo, they need a new URL. The other problem is of course the space limit. This is very interesting, very refreshing, very simple and clever, very well done, very everything good. Bravo and thank you. > Respects light/dark mode Not really… using js to change the CSS on the go is not a good practice. Why does it matter? Because of the “dark mode” browser extensions. They often use the presence of @media query (or other standard CSS means of setting dark mode colors), and if it’s the JS that changes the colors we often get partial Dark Mode, which does not work at all. No js is used for colors. Brings this to mind: https://hashify.me/IyBUaXRsZQ== Nice! I love this. I built Ponder in the same vein. It, however, has 10 files. I did not use the URL, did not have double the fun, and now I’m sad. In case you missed it: it is possible to style textarea via CSS and share it. - https://textarea.my/#TYuxDcIwEEWpmeKUCiSIJQoKU0KFRBUWOGwnWDi... Amazing. The crime and punishment example crashed my iPhone’s Google Chrome when I tap the URL haha I wonder if this can be paired with a local URL shortener? Chaining this with a local URL shortener can mean access to any doc with a single letter (or very letters). Seems like we have all built something similar. hopefully mine can stand out with all the extra features i have managed to cram in A few weeks ago I vibe coded a guitar tab editor just because I wanted to share a quick tab in a chat group with my band. When the first prototype already worked great, I just couldn’t stop to add features so that it now even has mouseover chord diagrams and copy and paste. The sharing works just like here, by encoding the tab itself in the url. I have a similar one using localStorage
https://github.com/mkaz/browser-pad this is indeed minimalistic :) I feel this is more of a fun toy project because if i used it every day my browser history cache and browser performance would get annihilated I love this. Now if you bootstrap the app code into the url too then you can have a minimal kernel to run any machine in url. Then you can also make a Quine somehow. I wrote a similar app when mathbin was shutting down. It allows about 1500 characters of mathjax-displayed notes. [1] In Firefox, https://textarea.my shows up as as a completely static non-actionable white page. Just white, with default cursor. No errors on the console. Something similar by Eric Wastl (of Advent of Code fame): https://topaz.github.io/paste/ Thanks for sharing! I tried a similar content-in-url approach for a family grocery list app but I couldn't get the url that short. (It worked but it was a bit cumbersome sharing over Whatsapp.) Will see what I can learn from this! I created a similar app just 2 days ago targeting Whatsapp (https://linqshare.com) . Context: In my locality, EA, we normally have Whatsapp groups raising funds for whatever reason; for every content edit, the admin has to copy-edit-paste updated content(which contains name and amount) to the group. This small app intends to provide a table that's easy to convey this info. App stores content in the url but a preview image (needed for Whatsapp share) is stored at R2. Let me know if you want the source code running at Cloudflare. --edit--
test link: https://linqshare.com/#eJxtkM9KxDAQxl-lzLmHrv8Ova3IHlz04BY8F... Neat. But why would you auto-set the title from markdown heading syntax when it doesn’t support markdown? (Or any rich text in fact) You can still write markdown. Nobody prevents you. I think a couple of days ago I stumbled upon your editor in corp Google intranets when I was looking for internal tool to pretty print some json, small world :) The http://go/fmt-err? =) Yes, it is mine. My own plug, translate between SQL dialects, state stored in URL so you can share it: Are <head>, <body>, and </html> missing intentionally? Safari 15.6.1: Unhandled Promise Rejection: ReferenceError: Can't find variable: CompressionStream I probably shouldn’t presume to speak for the OP, but given that they’re optional, I would think so, yes. Just started making my own recently with CodeMirror 6 during holidays. No saving function for now: https://qbane.github.io/cgm Love your other tools, btw! Thanks! This hack has completely disrupted my afternoon! Perhaps even forever after. 546,229 character-length URL for the Crime and Punishment example. Half a megabyte for a URL. That certainly is a thing. Can you make it monospace by default, so that this can be used as a code snippet bin? Sure! textarea.my support custom style attr: https://textarea.my/#Ky4tSlVUyCotLlEoLUhJLElVKC6pzElVSCwpKWJ... How do you share after that? I can open devtools and change the attribute but the URL doesn't update after that. Update the text a bit to trigger save event. love it, funny enough, I had similar idea pop into my head some weeks ago, just to be able to store quick notes and favorite them in my browser for later It would be neat if ctrl+s offered to download the textarea to a .txt file. The only thing missing is markdown and few themes. I think this is awesome idea for sharing. Love what you did with it. Love it! Can you save anything? No that should be: https://textarea.my/#c8yrLMnIzEsHAA== More like: https://textarea.my/#c8yrLMnIzEu3BwA= Not OP: sure, just bookmark it kinda -- but then you have to re-bookmark it every time you update it... It also saves to localStorage Now what if it didn't pollute browser history I like these kinds of projects, but adding a file export/import is inevitable. It's less about the limits of a URL and more about practicality. I also have no way to confirm that URLs aren't logged server side, so I'd never trust the claim about "no tracking". That's why these projects also end up self-hosted. hash part of url only available in the browser, as far as I know, server doesn’t have access to # value very easy for the server to intentionally (or by compromise) add a one liner to send the hash text up. Typos and URL mangles are common though, and I'd still have no way to confirm if it got logged in that case. It's out of scope for anything in the github source, and instead depends on the server hosting the page. I know this isn't meant to be super secure, but it's still worth a mention. Typos aren't making the hash part turn into something else. Like your parent comment explained to you, the hash part is not sent to the server. If you go out of your way to mangle the URL then of course a mangled URL without hash will likely get logged to the server. But I'm not sure how one would manage to go so much out of the way that they mangle the URL in a way that removes the hash. You don't have a choice pasting links into some apps. They may strip out query and hash components, percent encode, force URL shortener services, etc. Percent encoding is particularly bad since it may also bloat the length causing truncation and the decompress to fail. There's endless footguns with URLs.
More examples
https://gabrielsroka.github.io/webpages/ https://gabrielsroka.github.io/webpages/calc.htm#a1:=Rate=3.875;a2:=Years=30;a3:=NPer=Years*12;a4:=PV=644000;a5:=Pmt=Math.round(Math.pmt(Rate/12/100,NPer,PV)*100+1)/100;rows:5;cols:1
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