
Simple text editor has over 15k monthly users - ent101
https://www.mytextarea.com/
======
dang
Started on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3631917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3631917)

Follow-up a year later:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6366724](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6366724)

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keyle
You know it's fairly trivial to do this in html with a few lines of code...
HTML Editable, save to local storage; pretty handy stuff.

Has anyone built a substantial one like this for their own use?

~~~
brntn
I build a little scratchpad for personal use:
[https://sesh.github.io/scratchpad/](https://sesh.github.io/scratchpad/)

I guess for the most part these sort of things start off solving a personal
problem. Getting 15k monthly users is very impressive!

~~~
ent101
Scratchpad looks pretty nice actually!

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JDiculous
Here's a free minimal text editor I wrote:
[https://www.writepad.xyz](https://www.writepad.xyz) (or
[https://writepad.netlify.com](https://writepad.netlify.com))

Features:

\- Works offline

\- Autosaves to local storage

\- Downloadable as PWA (Progressive Web App) on mobile

\- Dark mode

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goodside
That’s not the world’s simplest text editor.

This is:

    
    
      data:text/html, <html contenteditable>
    

That’s a working URL. Paste it into your browser. Bookmark it for later.

No distracting GUI. No superfluous features like “save” or “open”. Does not
track active user statistics. Works offline.

~~~
oefrha
No, ed(1) is the simplest and the _standard_ text editor. And it has more than
16 users.

[https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-
msg.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html)

~~~
goodside
The source code to ed(1) is substantially harder to memorize, and the mobile
experience is sub-par. ed(1) may seem to have strong user metrics, but they’re
artificially inflated by users who don’t know how to close it and thus have
kept the same session open since the early 1970s, making it difficult to
inform them of other options.

~~~
oefrha
> the mobile experience is sub-par

To be fair, your editor’s tty experience is pretty much nonexistent. Tty is
surely more important than mobile, don’t you think?!

Now, data:text/html, <textarea> at least works with w3m, but when I try to
edit the textarea (surprise!) it just launches ed(1).

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mostlystatic
I use [https://bigtextbox.com/](https://bigtextbox.com/) a lot, as a nicer way
to leave a note in the browser than doing a Google search.

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Galaco
Interesting idea, but realised that I can't use undo/redo after pressing Tab
(at least on FireFox); it immediately made the experience awkward and more
complicated.

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torgian
As I'm sitting here with my pencil, paper, and eraser ( some pencils come with
erasers! ), I wonder what could be easier than this kind of text editor.

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scrame
Huh. Pretty cool. I can't set a filename on firefox, but I like that the style
is bigger than the actual markup.

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rhabarba
"World's simplest text editor" sends 13 requests to a web server, including
one to world's leading spyware company. No, thank you.

~~~
vijucat
Exactly. I can't imagine why anyone would use a web site for drafting text,
especially "temporary" drafts, which are probably more in need of privacy than
the subsequent text that we publish / send out! What I do is have OneNote open
all the time. It's blocked by the firewall from contacting the web and all
notebooks are local. As an upside: if the temporary text turns into something
substantial, you can use OneNote's organizing features to organize it, too.
AKOO: Always Keep OneNote Open :-)

~~~
rhabarba
(Insert the usual discussion about org-mode here.) ;-)

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classified
World's simplest text editor is:

    
    
      $ cat > edited.txt
    

Enter text, hit ^D when you're done.

If you pray hard enough, Google will find a way to let you do that in a
browser, so someone can count MAUs.

~~~
raverbashing
Yeah but can you edit text? You can only input it.

Readline and shell edit commands are a better text editor than simply cat.

    
    
       echo "Your text here edited as you want" > edited.txt

~~~
classified
You are right of course, I was just aiming for the _simplest_ possible editor.
Would you agree that having support for backspace still just barely counts as
editing?

~~~
Drakar1903
Only in the same way as when you can write down 10^20 as 10+10+10+10+10+...

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tiborsaas
I use this site for utilising the browsers spell checker :)

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hajimemash
Wow! How do you know it has over 15k monthly users?

~~~
ent101
It says so in the "Show info" section. Alexa stats check out too.

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starpilot
Now... is it ramen profitable?

~~~
classified
Good question. It will only be a matter of time until you need a browser and
an internet connection to blink your eye or take a breath. Google will be up
your every orifice. I bet they'll find a way to make a profit from that.

~~~
bostik
Maybe they can convince and buy pro.be domain from the Belgian registry (who
have marked it as "not available"). That way you could have a subdomain for
every conceivable phenomenon, surface and orifice.

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purplezooey
How does the author make any money... I see no ads

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qwerty456127
Given the amount of unused space in the toolbar I believe you can safely add
some handy features without making it worse in any sense so even more people
would appreciate it. I'd add regex search&replace (with support to add/replace
newline and tab symbols) and codepage conversion (including support for
decrypting wrong codepage text and encoding/decoding the selected text as a
URL replacing non-latin symbols with their codes and vice versa).

~~~
mkoryak
Right now it does this one thing pretty well. Adding more features is not
always the answer.

