Show HN: OverType – A Markdown WYSIWYG editor that's just a textarea
Hi HN! I got so frustrated with modern WYSIWYG editors that I started to play around with building my own. The problem I had was simple: I wanted a low-tech way to type styled text, but I didn't want to load a complex 500KB library, especially if I was going to initialize it dozens of times on the same page. Markdown in a plain <textarea> was the best alternative to a full WYSIWYG, but its main drawback is how ugly it looks without any formatting. I can handle it, but my clients certainly can't. I went down the ContentEditable rabbit hole for a few years, but always came to realize others had solved it better than I ever could. I kept coming back to this problem: why can't I have a simple, performant, beautiful markdown editor? The best solution I ever saw was Ghost's split-screen editor: markdown on the left, preview on the right, with synchronized scrolling. T
Why it failed
Hi HN! I got so frustrated with modern WYSIWYG editors that I started to play around with building my own. The problem I had was simple: I wanted a low-tech way to type styled text, but I didn't want to load a complex 500KB library, especially if I was going to initialize it
- Kind
- startup
- Status
- Shut down
- Inventor
- panphora
- Ended
- 2025
- Source
- hackernews