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…
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.
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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!
> Plain Markdown on your own disk, nothing to sign in to, and the whole dialect when you want it — five things worth knowing first, each argued in detail further down
Just to break it down:
"Plain Markdown on your own disk": What an odd way of saying it stores Markdown files on your computer. In this day and age, "Stores all your data locally" is an easy way say this.
"...nothing to sign in to": Reads so awkwardly, I think, because it declares that something that doesn't exist is a good thing. It's like advertising home delivery with "no store to go to". I would put "no account needed" or "no sign-up required".
"...and the whole dialect when you want it": The "when you want it" is so weird here. Why not say it supports all of Markdown?
"...five things worth knowing first, each argued in detail further down": There is something uniquely strange about this phrasing. Why not just say: "Here's five things you should know"? Or just drop it. It doesn't add anything.
Claude is terrible at writing copy. GPT is a bit better. At the moment, Gemini is the best one, I find.
Also, what does the term "greco-roman" have anything to do with Markdown editors?
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...
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…
Read the full thread on Hacker News →
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