Solo dev spends 10 months building Beauty, a WYSIWYG Markdown editor for Mac, iOS and web
thiagoperes · hn · 2026-09-27
A developer shipped Beauty, a local-first Markdown editor built over 10 months, available on Mac, iPhone and web (browser version needs no account).
- Live rendering: Markdown renders in place as you type, including tables (drag-and-resize without lining up pipes), KaTeX math and Mermaid diagrams
- Local files: Mac notes are plain .md files with images alongside, each note keeps 200 versions
- P2P sharing: Shared notes sync peer-to-peer over WebRTC; the signaling server only sees a random room id
- Engineering: 1,000 commits mostly went into the contenteditable-based editor, where the browser is not allowed to restructure the document; novel performance approaches will be open-sourced later
- Free without ads, with an optional subscription for sync via your own iCloud
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