Comment by random3
19 hours ago
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.
Best of luck! I'll watch this.
Since you're an Obsidian user, can I please get your feedback on https://hyperclast.com/ which I'm building?
(I'm not quite ready to do a Show HN yet, so please don't post it, but I'm ready for some early feedback if you'll indulge me)
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.
Thank you so much, I'll improve those points. I agree that a sample workspace would be great. I'm going to work on that today.
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.
Thanks, I'll fix that.
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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.
Thank you!
> 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
Thanks, will do
> embed the interface in your landing page
Great idea, I'll do that!
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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?
Thanks, I mentioned "fast" to differentiate it from Notion, which becomes super slow as you add more and more pages.
Obsidian and Zed are desktop apps, whereas Hyperclast is web-based. Obsidian isn't multi-player, and not really meant for teams.
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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.
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
Do people still use $language editors?
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.
Valid skepticism! A few counterpoints:
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.
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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.
What is Obsidian written in? Electron?
It’s closed source but yeah - electron all the way.
Yes; it's also not open source.
I'm fine with that.
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.
[1] https://fair.io/
[2] https://faircode.io/
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