Hi HN!
For the last 8 months we've been working on leaflet.pub, a web app for making delightful documents. We're trying to strike a balance between Notion and Google Docs — very fast, ultralight and easy to share, but also supporting rich blocks and multiple pages.
Weirdly, none of the many notetaking/document apps that we could find hit this combination, so we made Leaflet. With it you can:
- Instantly create a doc, without an account
- Share read and edit links
- Sign-in with email to sync your docs to different devices
- Add rich blocks, like canvases, subpages, rsvps, and polls
It's really useful for one-off collaborations, running events, or just when you need a blank page without having to buy into a whole organizational system.
We also spent a lot of time making sure Leaflets look good. We've found that there's a pretty blurry boundary between a document and a website, so making something that people can feel proud to publish online was key.
Here's a couple examples!
- Jake's presentation on Slöjd, traditional handcraft pedagogy (https://leaflet.pub/3d28b4a7-3703-4ae5-aaf6-d270ffe1151f)
- Laura's documentation of her website redesign (https://leaflet.pub/14aba696-e894-440a-9d06-917641a2bfce)
Some technical details that might be interesting:
- We do sync and all our client-side state via Replicache, which I really love!
- Data is modeled as a set of facts about entities, a la Datomic, forming a graph. This has been flexible enough for us to quickly build new features, like canvases and nested pages, without committing to a single document structure.
- We use ProseMirror, but not for the entire document. Instead every text block is a separate ProseMirror instance. This lets us keep the document structure in our database and our schema, without having to dive into ProseMirror's every time we want to modify things.
Our (somewhat messy) source is available here: https://github.com/hyperlink-academy/leaflet if you want to dig deeper!
On the horizon:
- Better home and document organizing features — things like search, tagging, collections etc.
- We're really excited about ATProto and Bluesky and are working on a set of lexicons and an AppView for document publishing! This will include a lexicon for rich text documents, as well as one publications, and some concept of memberships or subscriptions.
- More blocks! Tables, code blocks, etc.
Some things we're particularly proud of:
- Our list handling
- Custom theming
- Keyboard handling on iOS Safari (and generally works excellently on mobile)
- Side-scrolling multi-page interface
- Works as a PWA!
Some things that still need work:
- While faster than others, still a lot of work we can do on performance, both speed when working with very large documents and loading docs generally
- Drag and drop and selection in general could be a lot nicer
- Keyboard navigation across multiple pages
- Multiplayer cursors, and generally real-time sync could be sped up greatly leveraging CRDTs (we already use YJS, just could move updates around faster)
You can create a new document just by visiting https://leaflet.pub (or https://leaflet.pub/new if you're signed in) — would love to hear your thoughts and any feedback if you give it a try!
May or may not be relevant for you (and is definitely a very different field/product), but if you're releasing client libraries/SDKs of any sort, it might be good to be aware of. There's a large ecosystem of plugin libraries named "leaflet-foo" or "foo-leaflet" etc in addition to the "main" one. If you start releasing any libraries to work with your app (even if they're not JS), you'll likely want to be aware of and work around naming collisions for library names.
Either way, looks nifty!! I love the approach and we need more people willing to do something like this that competes with google docs / etc, but does so by targeting a specific use case / niche / etc and not by trying to do everything.
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