This is cool. I was hoping to see progress coming from Zed (e.g. because Tree-sitter → https://github.com/tree-sitter-grammars/tree-sitter-markdown) but it's exciting to see this.
I'm a heavy Obsidian user, and I love it, but I'd love to see real alternatives focused on foundations.
It would be interesting to know more about the end-goal if any.
Thanks! The end-goal is a fast, native Markdown editor that "just works" - no Electron, no web tech, instant startup. v0.3.0 will extract Mermaid as a standalone crate and build a custom text editor widget to unlock features egui's TextEdit blocks (proper multi-cursor, code folding). Long-term: potentially extract the editor as a headless Rust library since that's missing in the ecosystem. See ROADMAP.md for details
My impression was that everyone uses their $EDITOR and integrates languages support via plugins. The only exception to this rule I know is Emacs (org mode). I really doubt a standalone md editor will get traction, no matter how good it is.
Market exists: Obsidian has 1M+ users, Typora is popular, iA Writer has a loyal following. These aren't VS Code users who wandered off — they're writers, PKM enthusiasts, and note-takers who find IDE-style editors overwhelming for prose.
Different audience: Developers might prefer VS Code + Markdown Preview Enhanced. But Ferrite targets people who want a focused writing tool, not a general-purpose editor that happens to support Markdown. Think "writing app" vs "code editor with Markdown support."
Native advantage: Most Markdown tools are Electron (Obsidian, Typora, Mark Text). Ferrite offers instant startup, lower RAM, and native performance — appeals to the "I want my tools to feel fast" crowd.
You might be right that it won't achieve mass adoption. But there's a niche for "Obsidian but native and lighter" that I think is underserved.
My impression was that Obsidian is more than an editor: personal wiki, todo tracker, database, etc..
The currently offered feature list in Ferrite — code blocks, mermaid — suggests you are targeting developers or tech people here, hence, not really iA Writer... Typora — never heard of it, can't comment.
Anyway, thanks for seeing this as skepticism, and not criticism.
With my comment, I tried to subtly suggest that there should be more to it, than an editor.
You're right, currently Ferrite leans developer/tech with Mermaid, JSON/YAML tree viewer, and CLI integration. The Obsidian-style features (wikilinks, backlinks, knowledge graph) are coming in v0.3.0.
Target audience is probably "developers who take notes" rather than pure writers. The native performance angle is the differentiator, same niche as "I want Notion but faster" or "Obsidian but lighter."
Completely non-accusatory, just wondering. Did you write this post using an LLM? I sort of feel the typical "voice" if LLM writing here and wondering if I should calibrate myself a bit in this.
Good calibration! Yes, I disclosed this in another comment (and now in the README). The HN responses are AI-assisted: I describe what I want to say, Claude drafts it, I review and post. My English isn't great, so AI helps me communicate more clearly.
Sometimes it is nice to have a separate application for notes compared to the editor being used for code. It means they can be customized for their individual purposes. Sometimes there are minor inconveniences (I miss multi-select/change in Obsidian sometimes), but even when I used an editor for my MD notes, I found myself using SublimeText for that while I used VSCode or IntelliJ for coding. Just a 1 of 1 experience, but as mentioned elsewhere, there is a large adoption of note taking apps separate from code editors, and a few of them use markdown as the underlying file type which I require for anything I use for portability.
You need something "more" on the website before you ask people to create an account. "Team workspace that stays fast" isn’t clear enough for me, at least. What is a workspace? What does the interface look like? Is it in the browser? Is it an app?
People will go "what is this?", "huh, I’m not gonna make a user for this, can’t tell what it is". Those are my 2 cents.
+1 to that. As a user, I am tired of having to sign up for an account on a SaaS website or installing an app from Github, only to realize the UI isn't a good fit for me. This will usually result in me bouncing from the app website instead of trying it out.
Suggestion: have a non-login demo available on your website, and high-res screenshots/animed gif of the app in action on your Github repo.
Disclaimer: I'm not your target audience, I don't care about collaboration or performance.
- There's a heavy emphasis on performance. Are you sure customers care about that more than real time collaboration and self hosting? (I don't think they care about CRDTs.)
- If I am experiencing pain because eg my Notion wiki is too big and is having serious performance issues, what I want to hear immediately is how you are going to help me migrate from Notion to your solution. Notion has a feature to export an entire workspace; can you ingest that and get me spun up with your product?
- If I hear something is open source I expect to be able to try it out immediately without logging in. It looks like you can do that but when you hit "Get Started" it puts you into a registration flow.
- You might take a look at how Zed is marketing themselves, they have a similar pitch (performance + realtime collaboration). The first thing they try to show you is a video where they demo the product and show how fast it is. (I think they focus too much on performance though.)
- The frontend is a web app right? If possible rather than a video, embed the interface in your landing page. If possible, let them share their document and try out collaborating on it with someone or with another browser tab. Give them an opportunity to be impressed.
I respect anyone who posts their work. Best of luck.
> There's a heavy emphasis on performance. Are you sure customers care about that more than real time collaboration and self hosting?
- Good point, I'll find out
> Notion has a feature to export an entire workspace; can you ingest that and get me spun up with your product?
Yes, I'm almost done with this feature
> If I hear something is open source I expect to be able to try it out immediately without logging in. It looks like you can do that but when you hit "Get Started" it puts you into a registration flow.
I link to that elsewhere in the page: https://hyperclast.com/dev/ I'll look into making this more prominent.
> You might take a look at how Zed is marketing themselves
FWIW re: performance, I love Obsidian, but performance is it's one main downside for me. I could care less about the real-time collaboration (they are my notes, not for team consumption, I'll share a file somewhere else for that) or self-hosting (sync so my notes exist wherever I am is more important to me than hosting them anywhere, again, my notes are private on purpose; obviously that isn't the case for everyone).
Anyways, just a counter-point to the commenter you were replying to.
The only thing I'll say is that it's great to see the feedback in this thread applied. It became very obvious to me what the tool is for and an abstract idea of what I can do with it.
However as others have said:
- A demo video would do a lot for your product.
- nit: Real-time markdown -> change to something that emphasizes collaboration/collaborative editing. For two reason - it's a much more familiar term in the space you are building and it's easier to understand (I think) for more people.
- A sample workspace (either public or a "starter workspace" that's available by default in a new account) that is non-trivial would be great to showcase your product. Look at obsidian using obsidian itself for it's own documentation site.
- Your about page is very well written - I wonder if you can pull up somethings from there onto the main page. https://hyperclast.com/about/
I didn't sign up yet however so can't provide more feedback.
I use Obsidian a lot, but very few extra features or plugins. My first impression is that I don’t get what you’re making from the website. Any tool worth using in this space (which I vaguely understand to be using large collections of Markdown and/or realtime multiediting) is fast. Obsidian is fast. Zed is fast. It’s table stakes for the kind of person who would use this already.
Is it just Zed + Obsidian? A good knowledge base that scales well and uses plain markdown, but has the fancy multi edit stuff?
I am aware of the current issues with open source licensing, but for my needs I don’t trust the elastic style licensing, especially when it claims to be open source but I can’t fork it to protect myself from a future rug pull situation.
I currently use Dendron in VS Code. Dendron is basically abandonware at this point because it couldn’t be monetized, but because it’s Apache licensed, I can fork it if I want, and continue to use it until something better comes along, or even modify it for my own needs.
It’s very hard to be successful financially in this space. Notion did it at the right time, but they are targeting enterprises who are willing to give their data to them, not individuals who want to run their own setup.
Maybe you can compete with Notion, but I’m not willing to put my stuff in a system that may not be around in a couple years, and I don’t have a license for.
Open source purity is problematic. The OSI was established by the hyperscalers, who are decidedly not open source either.
Purely "OSI-approved open source" mandates having no non-commercial or non-compete clause, which means anyone can come in and bleed off profits and energy from the core contributors of open source projects. It prevents most forms of healthy companies from existing on top.
We shouldn't be allergic to making money with the software we write - life is finite and it's more sustainable over the long term to maintain software as a job.
The new "ethical source" / "fair source" licenses that have been popping up recently [1, 2] give customers 100% use of the code, but prevent competitors from coming in and stealing away the profits from running managed offerings, etc. (I wish Obsidian were this, but it's fully closed. Still, I do not admire them any less for this choice. We venerate plenty of closed creators - it's silly to hold software to a different standard.)
AWS profits hundreds of millions a quarter off of open source developed by companies thinking they were doing the right thing. AWS turned these into a proprietary managed solutions and gave nothing back to the authors. The original wind up withering and dying. AWS isn't giving back, they're just hoovering up.
Obsidian being closed means the core authors are hyper focused and can be compensated (even if it's not much). It's not like they can rug pull us - the files are text files, we can use old versions, and if they did piss us off I'm sure someone would write an open source version.
Fully agree that pushing OSI is just posturing. After all, Amazon/Google/Facebook have made literal billions by commercializing open source software. I release stuff on MIT all the time (for things I'm okay with people poaching) but I'd argue the only "pure" OSS license is GPL, which comes with its own problems (and, as we all know, it infects everything it touches).
The problem with FSL is that it hasn't been tested in the courts yet (afaik), so it's a bit of a gamble to think it'll just "work" if some asshole does try to clone your repo and sell your work. Maybe it's a decent gamble for a funded startup with in-house counsel, but if you're just one guy, imo keep stuff you want to sell closed-source, it's not that big of a deal. We've been doing just that since the 70s.
The problem is hardly a resource one (unless you restart the browser) - you can’t see/scroll/wrangle 2000 tabs with the current tab display UI paradigm— you can’t even see their titles. Not to speak that Chrome state management is crap and you’ll end up losing them
Did we read the same article? It's a very obvious complaint from the author. It's not actually a problem anymore, but that's entirely my point.
> you can’t see/scroll/wrangle 2000 tabs with the current tab display UI paradigm— you can’t even see their titles
Pretty much all Chromium-based browsers have a button to display a vertical scrollable list of all open tabs (with their favicon, title, domain, and time since last access) with a filter/search bar. Firefox has a slightly less detailed version (but the same general UI pattern) of the same thing, and can be augmented with more functionality through extensions if the user desires. I swear everyone complaining about this stuff hasn't looked at a browser in years.
> Chrome state management is crap and you’ll end up losing them
I've been using and restoring the exact same session for years with no issues. If I close the browser and re-open it normally, my tabs remain. If the browser crashes and restarts, I click the button that says "restore" and it all immediately comes back just fine. Again, the problem you're describing hasn't actually been a problem in many years.
If anyone believes they're close to a generalization end-game wrt to AI capabilities, it makes no sense to do anything that could impact their advantage, by enabling others to compete. Collaboration makes sense on timeframes that don't imply zero-sum games.
Board games like the Settlers of Catan are good examples of the behavior— concretely the start of the game when everyone trades vs the end of the game when if you suspect someone wins it makes little sense to trade unless, you think it will help you win first.
> Collaboration makes sense on timeframes that don't imply zero-sum games.
People are fooling themselves if they think AGI will be zero sum. Even if only one group somehow miraculously develops it, there will immediately be fast followers. And, the more likely scenario is more than one group would independently pull it off - if it's even possible.
Maybe, but at least Open AI, XAI and any Bostrom believer thinks this is the case.
Ilya Sutskever (Sep 20, 2017)
> The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship. You are concerned that Demis could create an AGI dictatorship. So do we. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you chose to, especially given that we can create some other structure that avoids this possibility.
Bostrom / Ilya are agreeing with the GPs argument AFAICT: it's not that AGI can create a dictatorship-of-the-first-AGI-owner, it's that only having one serious funded lab going at it creates a knowledge gap of N years that could give said lab escape velocity*
* imagine if Google alone had LLMs. For an innocuous example, the only provider in my LLM client that regularly fails unit tests verifying they actually cache tokens and utilize them on a subsequent request is Gemini. I used to work at Google and it'd be horrible for that too-big-for-its-own-good institution regressing to the corporate mean to own LLMs all by itself
Why do people keep repeating this. The only way artificial intelligence is impossible is if intelligence is impossible. And we're here so that pretty much removes that impediment.
This. Every time Apple made Ui changes, I’ve seen negative reactions. People react negatively to change, not to good or bad necessarily. I’ve been using the ne UI since it was in the developer beta, and can’t really tell a practical difference.
It would be interesting to know more about the end-goal if any.
Best of luck! I'll watch this.
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