Yet another Hacker News

Show HN: Building a Markdown editor for Mac, iOS and web

39 points thiagoperes 5 hours ago 27 comments

I've spent the last 10 months building Beauty: a local, powerful greco-roman Markdown editor where the page looks finished while you type. It runs on the Mac, iPhone and in the browser, and the browser version opens without an account: https://app.markdown.beauty

I was frustrated with writing apps, and like most I used Apple Notes. After 2+ years immersed in Cursor, Codex and CC, I wished some interactions existed in a text editor.

The Markdown renders in place as you write it, including tables (which you can drag and resize without lining up pipes), KaTeX math and Mermaid diagrams. A lot of thought went into typography and the writing experience.

Your notes on the Mac are plain .md files in a folder with images next to them, so they open in anything else too. Each note keeps 200 versions. If you share a note with a link it syncs peer to peer over WebRTC while someone has it open, and the server that connects you only ever sees a random room id.

Most of the ~1,000 commits went into the editor itself. It's a contenteditable, and I don't let the browser restructure the document at all, which was a lot more work than I expected. Building this to be performant and cross-platform required some novel approaches, which I'll later open source. The editor is free with no account or ads, and there's an optional subscription for sync through your own iCloud.

https://www.markdown.beauty

KlyX 5 hours ago | parent

Hey, I quickly tried your editor and even when the writing experience is the most important thing, I have to admit it looks really lovely! I love the design and how it interacts. That is cool. Maybe you could add some more color options (not everyone likes the newish beige-toned interfaces). Cool that even flowcharts are supported. The only thing I miss in the block options would be a callout and the option to set a color for that callout. So far my first impressions :)

intrr 5 hours ago | parent

Amazing project and execution. Makes my IDE's quickly-bolted-on (3 hours) .md support look ridiculous in comparison. Installed as PWA. Thank you!

bernieo 5 hours ago | parent

Just tried it!

Hell yeah, someone finally got notes right. I don’t say this lightly, but notes are supposed to be simple, fast and easily retrieved.

Apple Notes doesn’t give us nearly enough. Notion gives way too much. Obsidian is a mess. Craft, AnyType, etc are janky, gimmicky or slow.

You managed to make something simple, local, that gives us exactly the features we need for writing and finding notes and also MCP so I can point my agent to it?! I’d give you a fcking nobel prize for this lol

NarcisMirandes 4 hours ago | parent

It looks really nice. I definitely will use it.

Many questions come to mind: - What is the revenue model? - What is your personal story? Why you do not explain it in the site?

thiagoperes 4 hours ago | parent

There's no revenue model, no clear goal. This app is a creative outlet and a sandbox to try ideas. I added an in-app purchase as a test to see if anyone cares, it would motivate me to keep working on it.

Without the constraints of a usual project, I feel I'll actually work on it for a much longer time.

I didn't add any story or personal background because I didn't think anyone would care, but good idea! In the meantime, you can follow along on x: @thiago_peres

nmekala35 1 hour ago | parent

the UI looks clean and slick. Nice work!

smokel 1 hour ago | parent

This question is somewhat more general than this specific application, but how can an app guarantee that files will remain local, also in future updates of the app?

To put it simply, an automatic update of the app might start uploading the notes to a server. I don't think there is any security boundary in iOS, Android, or any other platform preventing this, right?

Other than that, congratulations on what seems to be a nice app!

hyperhello 42 minutes ago | parent

What if any other app starts uploading the files too, though?

bionhoward 1 hour ago | parent

Looks epic, id like to connect a Dropbox folder

Jaxan 46 minutes ago | parent

Can’t you just open a folder inside your Dropbox folders? Then it should just sync, right?

(That’s how I use zettlr, but with nextcloud instead of Dropbox.)

mrwetsnow 1 hour ago | parent

What does the "Open Folder" option do? For me it opens a system open dialog, but there is no button to select something. Can I point this at my Obsidian folder and call it a day? If not, is there an easy way to import it?

mrwetsnow 59 minutes ago | parent

(Is there a place to file bugs?)

If I try to paste some text (this happens to be json), I get: Paste could not be applied here — nothing was changed.

It seems I can paste regular text, but trying to paste:

{ "mcpServers": { "beauty": { "args": [ "/Applications/Beauty.app/Contents/Resources/mcp/server.cjs", "--endpoint", "/Users/dant/Library/Containers/com.markdown.editor/Data/Library/Application Support/com.markdown.editor/mcp/endpoint.json", "--allow-writes" ], "command": "node" } } }

doesn't work. (This is the generated mcp config from the app itself, I wanted to see what it generated, and tried to paste it into the app. :) )

mrwetsnow 56 minutes ago | parent

Just a further pointer here, on a new note created:

This does not paste:

"/Applications/Beauty.app/Contents/Resources/mcp/server.cjs"

While this does:

"/Applications/Beauty.app/Contents/Resources/mcp/server.cjs

Something looking for matching quotes?

thiagoperes 4 minutes ago | parent

Thanks for these. I'll look into it! You can message hi [at] peres.pro with any feedback or report. There's a power user group as well if you'd like to try the betas

mrwetsnow 54 minutes ago | parent

Oh.. open folder opens the Notes folder in Finder... :P

iAMkenough 57 minutes ago | parent

Website appears to be vibe coded, with some content overflowing off the screen on mobile with no ability scroll horizontally.

rckt 55 minutes ago | parent

> I was frustrated with writing apps

Oh my hod… This absolutely AI generated intro.

Jaxan 47 minutes ago | parent

Indeed, and also:

> and like most I used Apple Notes.

Most people i know that write more then just some notes use obsidian, zettlr, … or one of many other markdown editors.

A comparison with existing apps would be nice.

thiagoperes 7 minutes ago | parent

Funnily enough, this is the only sentence written by myself. Other parts of the post were written with the help of AI.

Maybe I spent so much time using AI that I started to write like them?

arendtio 48 minutes ago | parent

The landing page feels very generic. I have seen this exact style on other vibe-coded pages, so you might want to spice it up a little.

However, regarding the editor, I really like it at first glance. I wonder if it is possible to register a PWA as the default app for .md files with KDE...

demibabs 21 minutes ago | parent

Yeah it looks like a really cool project.

But the landing page is not only obviously ai-generated but also hilariously long. (Like 3 times as long as VS Code’s.)

Maybe I’m wrong on this but does a fancy landing page even have any value in this day and age? Not like it signifies effort anymore…

jamesboehmer 42 minutes ago | parent

Awesome job, this looks fantastic, and has all of the UX gaps I wish existed in Bear and Obsidian. However, my 2 biggest pain points with those could use addressing, and I would happily pay a high one-time price and upgrade fees over the years if they could be solved: 1. My corporate laptop is locked down, so no apple app store installations. Could this be made into a brew-installable app and licensed another way? 2. Related - every corporate laptop I've had for the last 10 years prohibits app store and icloud storage. So Bear notes (which I subscribed to) can't sync. Obsidian has a sync service, but I don't trust it (would prefer apple or dropbox), but unfortunately the plugin ecosystem is messy and difficult. There is no reliable community-supported plugin for syncing with dropbox on mobile. If you could make syncing with dropbox possible on desktop and mobile, that would be the ultimate gift to the community.

thiagoperes 12 minutes ago | parent

Beauty is available on web at https://app.markdown.beauty. It has all the features, excluding things that rely on Apple APIs: search using embeddings and icloud sync. The library is stored using IndexDB and you can download the library at any time.

Not ideal, I know, but maybe it gives you a great typing UX at least

well_ackshually 39 minutes ago | parent

>Secure. Simple. Stoic.

You're writing a markdown editor, stop jerking yourself off, you're not Marc Aurelius.

thiagoperes 10 minutes ago | parent

Someone has to do it

avilay 27 minutes ago | parent

I am a heavy Typora user and I really like it except when it starts to glitch with longer documents (> 5000 words). How is this different from Typora? To be clear, I think it is ok if it isn't, the world is big enough for multiple markdown editors :-)

Also, what does the term "greco-roman" have anything to do with Markdown editors?

mrwetsnow 3 minutes ago | parent

"Your notes are a folder Plain Markdown on your own disk — open it anywhere, back it up, walk away with it."

Maybe I misunderstand, but the Notes folder isn't really usable from another app as is. There are no folders and all the md files have machine generated names. It appears you can export the data to get the actual structure, but that, of course, requires the app.

Something like Obsidian (or Typora mentioned below) can just be pointed at a folder and use it as is. Makes using multiple editors simple. Here, for example, there doesn't seem to be a way to use this data on linux.

Do I understand all of this correctly?

Thank you!