Developer Releases Beauty, a Markdown Editor for Mac, iPhone and Web
A developer says Beauty, a Markdown editor built over 10 months, now runs on Mac, iPhone and the web. It renders Markdown in place, stores notes as plain .md files and offers optional iCloud sync.
The editor renders Markdown in place as the user writes, including tables, KaTeX math and Mermaid diagrams. Tables can be dragged and resized without lining up pipe characters, and the developer said much of the work went into typography and the writing experience.
On the Mac, notes are stored as plain .md files in a folder, with images placed next to them, so they can be opened in other applications. Each note keeps 200 versions, according to the post.
When a note is shared with a link, it syncs peer to peer over WebRTC while someone has it open. The server that connects users only sees a random room ID, the developer wrote.
Most of the roughly 1,000 commits went into the editor itself. The developer described it as a contenteditable editor in which the browser is not allowed to restructure the document at all, a decision that required more work than expected. Building it to be performant and cross-platform also required novel approaches, which the developer said would later be open sourced.
The editor is free, with no account and no ads. An optional subscription provides sync through the user's own iCloud. The Hacker News post had received 9 points and 5 comments at the time of publication.