This looks really nice! Congratulations on building something awesome, especially in a space that's "crowded" with the big players.
I want to give kudos to two things:
1. It took you 10 months to build this. This is focused product development and craftsmanship which is very different from Vibe coding something. So let this be a reminder to all the "I can vibe code this or that in a weekend". Good products / experiences take time.
2. You've pursued building something in a space that anyone would normally dismiss right away: "Why would anyone use this? Google Docs/ Word etc already does this" or "MSFT / GOOG will destroy you". Good on you for picking something that is hard and building it well. I actually had this idea and almost built it but dismissed it myself for the same reasons as above. So reminder again for the builders in the back: Doesn't matter if there is a 800lb gorilla building this, if you can execute it better go for it.
> This is focused product development and craftsmanship which is very different from Vibe coding something. So let this be a reminder to all the "I can vibe code this or that in a weekend". Good products / experiences take time.
How do you know? There isn't a git repo that one can see the history of, he could have coded this in one weekend and used the rest of the time doing noncoding activities. Also, he could have made the entire thing by prompting without any hands on coding at all. The fact that it is a web app with a SaaS platform (the thing that LLM-assisted coding is the best at) doesn't inspire confidence.
Thanks, that's nice. Yeah it's been 10 months, and 7 of them completely full time... living off savings. I think there's plenty of room for innovation with word processors now that we have LLMs and the big players are unlikely to go far outside the box.
I'm building a similar project, and I may open-source it. I'm using OnlyOffice and a coding agent that modifies the files with Python libraries in a sandbox (e.g. python-pptx for PowerPoint files).
Have you also considered using a solution like OnlyOffice for your product? Or a "Notion-like" lib such as Tiptap or PlateJS?
I wanted to build something canvas-based, so that eliminated most of these options. I also just wanted full control of that part of my stack... it's the core product after all. There are several TipTap/ProseMirror wrappers out there already.
You should share yours though, would be interested to see
Anecdote from a frustrated typer. There are no good word processors. MS office and Libre/open-whatever-they-call-it-now-office are bloated mess. I did a deep dive on this a few months ago, and there are 0 light/good options. There are a few that show up in google searches, but they are all disappointing in one way or another.
So, thoughts on a non-AI lightweight word processor.
Pages.app on Apple platforms is free-as-in-beer, native & instantly responsive UI, launches in a handful of milliseconds, collaborative. Unsure if you would consider it a bloated mess or not; the UI is pretty minimal but still competent for most work.
What features would you expect from a good word processor? What features should it leave out, i.e. features make MS Office / OpenOffice / LibreOffice a bloated mess?
It is absolutely crazy to me that this is criteria. Office 2003 checked those boxes in that era. This was a solved thing that somehow warrants further deliberation now. I believe it is The Great Moore's Law Compensator.
Speaking of zed, if the team at zed is reading this, then I genuinely believe with my full heart that you guys can actually solve this issue given the impressive work you have done at trying to make the editor fast.
If you work towards something like google docs etc., this product feels right within your category and can work with the team features at zed to a far greater degree.
Zed also natively has AI functionality so it can work for some people and the best part about Zed is that AI functionality can be toggled off too :-)
This might as well be a billion dollar unsolved problem which the team at zed could use their expertise on perhaps. Although I suggest that maybe instead of bolting these functionalities into zed itself, maybe a zed-fork can be created for a more Microsoft word alternative?
Has someone tried at making a zed extension which can somehow be a word editor or anything similar, perhaps it might be possible within the frameworks of zed now itself but I am not sure.
I hope someone at zed team reads this and solves this problem. Zed is fantastic piece of software, thanks for making it zed team :-)
Revise is that, actually. It's a free, lightweight, fast word processor at its core. It also has real-time collaboration, also free. You don't need to use the AI features.
It even supports code blocks, LaTeX, and Mermaid diagrams.
Also, the passive spelling/grammar checking in the editor is powered by LLMs and completely free. It will catch mistakes that other word processors won't, such as malapropisms.
Ty; will check it out. That wasn't one of the one I looked at.
Edit: Ah I see, from the OP. Unfortunately, I think Subscription-based, web-app, and vibe-coded would individually be deal breakers. Combined indicates it's not the sort of tool I seek.
Friend, this is NOT how you talk within public for a product which mind you, might handle sensitive information.
Some people (myself included) will not like subscription-based, web app.
You worked 7 months on this project full time on your savings as you mention and you might've squandered any reputational gains from that with just three words and a comma.
Might as well go down in the history of hackernews but a bit negatively. I hope that you take a deeper look at how you respond online.
I have a suggestion but if you feel like you are not sure how to respond to a comment, then don't at the moment rather than typing this for example.
perhaps treat it as a learning exercise on how to answer such questions because if you ever market to anyone, customer or business. It is natural that they will ask such questions and so in a way, it might be beneficial.
Just my 2 cents.
Anecdotally, it takes a lot of patience to answer criticism in a good manner and definitely takes a lot of time to craft a good answer if you do go through that route but in the long term/even in the short term, those are some of the best messages that I have written personally which genuinely make me appreciate myself.
I wish that you can take a deeper reflection into such question as you are most likely going to be asked it quite often and having an good answer early on might be beneficial for your product.
I gave a good faith response initially, and got back a reply about how it's dismissed outright for being for "web based" and "a subscription". Even after I explained that the core product is completely free and even includes free LLM spellchecking. Web-based and subscription payments describes the majority of software out there today. If this is his criteria for dismissing a project outright then I'm not sure what to say other than "ok bro".
I've built an agent loop that has a self-review step, and it's pretty good at catching mistakes. It's able to scan the document in chunks and use tools to surgically change small parts.
I do a decent amount of writing on my blog and for work so I was thinking, "why doesn't this product appeal to me?"
I think I'm hesitant to spent yet another monthly subscription on something. I get decent mileage just copying and pasting sections into Claude so it's hard to justify another $8 a month on another tool.
I also do a decent amount of my editing in raw markdown files and apply styling almost as a post-process. Part of the problem is that I'm always pasting documents into corporate portals (Confluence, Wiki's, Google Docs) and they don't always copy formatting in the way I'd expect. So I just write raw text and format it after paste.
Thanks for the feedback. The pitch with Revise is it's a fully integrated agent inside a word processor. The "copy and paste between ChatGPT and docs" is the workflow I set out to improve on a la PG's "find something people are doing and figure out a way to do it that doesn't suck." I think you'd find it's a much better user experience, especially when you're iterating a lot on something.
I get that subscriptions turn some people off, and I'm open to other ideas of how to make a project like this financially sustainable. I don't want to do ads :)
Can this be integrated inside of something like Google Docs or Microsoft Word? Or is that more of an aspiration at this point? The vibe I got from the landing page was that it's a standalone app.
Not without having control over those products and their source code, which is why I built an alternative. From my testing, the Revise agent is more capable than Gemini+Docs and Copilot are right now.
Thanks for the feedback. It seems my post got flag-bombed at some point. I can't reply to takahitoyoneda anvevoice techpulse_x or Remi_Etien. feel free to email me art@art.cx
Offtopic, but there is truly something about word.<TLD> that I really like. I have the domain use.expert and art.cx is actually a good catch of a domain.
I also own mirror.forum
Good 5 letter (total word + tld) are actually pretty rare/almost exhausted now so good catch :)
Why don't you use your local open source llm, without the interaction of big models?
I mean, more work, but you don't need to pay your cut to them. Just asking.
This looks really nice! Congratulations on building something awesome, especially in a space that's "crowded" with the big players.
I want to give kudos to two things:
1. It took you 10 months to build this. This is focused product development and craftsmanship which is very different from Vibe coding something. So let this be a reminder to all the "I can vibe code this or that in a weekend". Good products / experiences take time.
2. You've pursued building something in a space that anyone would normally dismiss right away: "Why would anyone use this? Google Docs/ Word etc already does this" or "MSFT / GOOG will destroy you". Good on you for picking something that is hard and building it well. I actually had this idea and almost built it but dismissed it myself for the same reasons as above. So reminder again for the builders in the back: Doesn't matter if there is a 800lb gorilla building this, if you can execute it better go for it.
Kudos!
> This is focused product development and craftsmanship which is very different from Vibe coding something. So let this be a reminder to all the "I can vibe code this or that in a weekend". Good products / experiences take time.
How do you know? There isn't a git repo that one can see the history of, he could have coded this in one weekend and used the rest of the time doing noncoding activities. Also, he could have made the entire thing by prompting without any hands on coding at all. The fact that it is a web app with a SaaS platform (the thing that LLM-assisted coding is the best at) doesn't inspire confidence.
if you can build this in one weekend, I'd like to hire you
Thanks, that's nice. Yeah it's been 10 months, and 7 of them completely full time... living off savings. I think there's plenty of room for innovation with word processors now that we have LLMs and the big players are unlikely to go far outside the box.
I'm building a similar project, and I may open-source it. I'm using OnlyOffice and a coding agent that modifies the files with Python libraries in a sandbox (e.g. python-pptx for PowerPoint files).
Have you also considered using a solution like OnlyOffice for your product? Or a "Notion-like" lib such as Tiptap or PlateJS?
I definitely looked at TipTap and ended up building off their Y.js backend, which is great: https://tiptap.dev/docs/hocuspocus/getting-started/overview
I wanted to build something canvas-based, so that eliminated most of these options. I also just wanted full control of that part of my stack... it's the core product after all. There are several TipTap/ProseMirror wrappers out there already.
You should share yours though, would be interested to see
Subsciption and Online means not for me
Er, is right click disabled on this page? Certainly seems to be in any browser I pick. If so, why?
Unintended, thanks. fixed
Anecdote from a frustrated typer. There are no good word processors. MS office and Libre/open-whatever-they-call-it-now-office are bloated mess. I did a deep dive on this a few months ago, and there are 0 light/good options. There are a few that show up in google searches, but they are all disappointing in one way or another.
So, thoughts on a non-AI lightweight word processor.
Pages.app on Apple platforms is free-as-in-beer, native & instantly responsive UI, launches in a handful of milliseconds, collaborative. Unsure if you would consider it a bloated mess or not; the UI is pretty minimal but still competent for most work.
I am not a defender of Word (2024) but it starts in 1-2 seconds in my laptop.
Actually the speed is a problem when you have hundreds of pages with track changes and comments.
Maybe you should check Wordperfect or WordStar ;)
What features would you expect from a good word processor? What features should it leave out, i.e. features make MS Office / OpenOffice / LibreOffice a bloated mess?
Start fast (maybe <100ms), respond instantly, good UX.
It is absolutely crazy to me that this is criteria. Office 2003 checked those boxes in that era. This was a solved thing that somehow warrants further deliberation now. I believe it is The Great Moore's Law Compensator.
AbiWord
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbiWord
Ty. I looked at that, and unfortunately cannot recall why I rejected it.
What exactly would the perfect tool look like?
Perfect isn't the goal. But something on the tier of KiCad, Blender, Zed, Sublime, etc.
Speaking of zed, if the team at zed is reading this, then I genuinely believe with my full heart that you guys can actually solve this issue given the impressive work you have done at trying to make the editor fast.
If you work towards something like google docs etc., this product feels right within your category and can work with the team features at zed to a far greater degree.
Zed also natively has AI functionality so it can work for some people and the best part about Zed is that AI functionality can be toggled off too :-)
This might as well be a billion dollar unsolved problem which the team at zed could use their expertise on perhaps. Although I suggest that maybe instead of bolting these functionalities into zed itself, maybe a zed-fork can be created for a more Microsoft word alternative?
Has someone tried at making a zed extension which can somehow be a word editor or anything similar, perhaps it might be possible within the frameworks of zed now itself but I am not sure.
I hope someone at zed team reads this and solves this problem. Zed is fantastic piece of software, thanks for making it zed team :-)
Revise is that, actually. It's a free, lightweight, fast word processor at its core. It also has real-time collaboration, also free. You don't need to use the AI features.
It even supports code blocks, LaTeX, and Mermaid diagrams.
Also, the passive spelling/grammar checking in the editor is powered by LLMs and completely free. It will catch mistakes that other word processors won't, such as malapropisms.
Ty; will check it out. That wasn't one of the one I looked at.
Edit: Ah I see, from the OP. Unfortunately, I think Subscription-based, web-app, and vibe-coded would individually be deal breakers. Combined indicates it's not the sort of tool I seek.
lol, ok bro
Friend, this is NOT how you talk within public for a product which mind you, might handle sensitive information.
Some people (myself included) will not like subscription-based, web app.
You worked 7 months on this project full time on your savings as you mention and you might've squandered any reputational gains from that with just three words and a comma.
Might as well go down in the history of hackernews but a bit negatively. I hope that you take a deeper look at how you respond online.
I have a suggestion but if you feel like you are not sure how to respond to a comment, then don't at the moment rather than typing this for example.
perhaps treat it as a learning exercise on how to answer such questions because if you ever market to anyone, customer or business. It is natural that they will ask such questions and so in a way, it might be beneficial.
Just my 2 cents.
Anecdotally, it takes a lot of patience to answer criticism in a good manner and definitely takes a lot of time to craft a good answer if you do go through that route but in the long term/even in the short term, those are some of the best messages that I have written personally which genuinely make me appreciate myself.
I wish that you can take a deeper reflection into such question as you are most likely going to be asked it quite often and having an good answer early on might be beneficial for your product.
have a nice day.
I gave a good faith response initially, and got back a reply about how it's dismissed outright for being for "web based" and "a subscription". Even after I explained that the core product is completely free and even includes free LLM spellchecking. Web-based and subscription payments describes the majority of software out there today. If this is his criteria for dismissing a project outright then I'm not sure what to say other than "ok bro".
How do you make sure the LLM catches and reports all grammar mistakes if I ask for it?
I've built an agent loop that has a self-review step, and it's pretty good at catching mistakes. It's able to scan the document in chunks and use tools to surgically change small parts.
This looks wonderful!
I do a decent amount of writing on my blog and for work so I was thinking, "why doesn't this product appeal to me?"
I think I'm hesitant to spent yet another monthly subscription on something. I get decent mileage just copying and pasting sections into Claude so it's hard to justify another $8 a month on another tool.
I also do a decent amount of my editing in raw markdown files and apply styling almost as a post-process. Part of the problem is that I'm always pasting documents into corporate portals (Confluence, Wiki's, Google Docs) and they don't always copy formatting in the way I'd expect. So I just write raw text and format it after paste.
Thanks for the feedback. The pitch with Revise is it's a fully integrated agent inside a word processor. The "copy and paste between ChatGPT and docs" is the workflow I set out to improve on a la PG's "find something people are doing and figure out a way to do it that doesn't suck." I think you'd find it's a much better user experience, especially when you're iterating a lot on something.
I get that subscriptions turn some people off, and I'm open to other ideas of how to make a project like this financially sustainable. I don't want to do ads :)
Can this be integrated inside of something like Google Docs or Microsoft Word? Or is that more of an aspiration at this point? The vibe I got from the landing page was that it's a standalone app.
Not without having control over those products and their source code, which is why I built an alternative. From my testing, the Revise agent is more capable than Gemini+Docs and Copilot are right now.
Thanks for the feedback. It seems my post got flag-bombed at some point. I can't reply to takahitoyoneda anvevoice techpulse_x or Remi_Etien. feel free to email me art@art.cx
Offtopic, but there is truly something about word.<TLD> that I really like. I have the domain use.expert and art.cx is actually a good catch of a domain.
I also own mirror.forum
Good 5 letter (total word + tld) are actually pretty rare/almost exhausted now so good catch :)
Wonderful product :)
Looks really cool!
This would really work well for teams. Are there any limits into how many people can collaborate on Revise?
No enforced limits right now, but HN might find the performance bounds of my backend today. I am planning to add team/org accounts soon!
Looks nice, very nice.
Why don't you use your local open source llm, without the interaction of big models? I mean, more work, but you don't need to pay your cut to them. Just asking.
Yes, an eventual goal is to let Revise use a local LLM.