Show HN: Lightwave – Real-time notes app, 3.5 years of hand-rolled JavaScript
I've been building this solo for about three and a half years. I kept trying every new project/notes tool (Notion, Asana, Trello, etc.) and always ended up back in a plain text file. I wanted something that felt like a text editor on first touch but could grow into real structure when you needed it.
https://lightwave.so (desktop only)
The tech stack is Laravel, MySQL, Redis, and hand-rolled JavaScript on the client. No frameworks like React/Vue/etc. ~270 lines of jQuery (out of 80k+ total LOC) for a few legacy DOM utilities, plus IndexedDB for local persistence. Real-time collaboration uses a hybrid approach: HTTP/2 POST for resilient ops + WebSockets via Laravel Reverb for live cursors, presence, and edits.
This is a pre-release stress test, not a launch. Lightwave will be a paid product. Right now I'm opening it up because no amount of solo testing replicates getting punched in the mouth by real traffic.
The link above has a button to create a test account in 1 click.
Known rough edges: the cursor and selection system are built from scratch (like VS Code, not a contenteditable wrapper), so there's a lot of surface area. Some keyboard shortcuts may be missing. Desktop only, accessibility not yet implemented. I'm shipping fixes in real time.
There's a "Submit Bug or Feedback" button inside the app if something breaks. Happy to answer any questions about the architecture, or anything else.
Some highlights:
- Paste markdown in, get native blocks. Copy blocks out, get markdown back.
- Hierarchical document, structure. Hierarchichal file manager.
- Live collab with shared cursors, selection, and presence.
- Code blocks with syntax highlighting. LaTeX math blocks.
- Full data export: markdown, JSON, and attachments. No lock-in.
- Full undo/redo with cursor restoration.
21 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 48.4 ms ] threadI would also make a small suggestion, which is that there is really no need to emphasize the fact that it's hand-written or without React or etc. While I suppose a small segment of users do truly care that you didn't use React, I think the primary consideration for most users will be how the app works. I would suggest mentioning how your technical decisions affect the user experience: is the performance better - and if so, can you quantify that?
(AKA: I'm not sure it's a good idea to use someone else's long-standing well-known brand in the digital space as name for your own digital space project)
- flickering
- keyboard appears on readonly document
- can select info text that should not be user selectable
- menu items melt into each other
- can‘t summon keyboard on editable content
- grabbing elements in a document and pulling them up leads to page refresh
- I saw a styling menu pop up once: No idea how I got that.
I am sorry but this is unusable and an awful experience on my iPhone.
https://imgur.com/a/GeErjTa
- manage subscription page broken?
Absolutely nothing here works, besides the anonymous login.
;-) love the Office Space references
On the collab side, any limitations on simultaneous users? Like just a couple at a time or can handle a team?
will look into ctrl backspace to delete words like that idea
- on non-supported browsers (eg. mobile) don't render the app, show a message instead
- Shift + Home/End for selecting text doesn't work
- Ctrl + N for a new page doesn't work
- things like the above ^, while it may be trivial, will turn off people who will not spend more than 10-20s to evaluate
- you're refer the simplicity of text files, but the editor is not fixed width, it's more like a Markdown-ish editor, closer to Google Docs with its default styles
- when typing - it creates a list, but the list's left margin (where the - starts) is not aligned on the overall left margin of the page, it's very annoying to me
- to me, this is too far away from the simplicity of a text file — this comment, I'm writing it up in Sublime in plain text, and then I'll copy it to Chrome/HN, but I wouldn't do it in your tool — I love being able to Alt-Tab to Sublime, hit Ctrl+N to get a new "file" which is a temporary/ephemeral workspace for typing text, typing and getting sasisfying fixed-width readable text, and then copy/pasting it to my destination, which almost always has a less pleasant editor
- eg. I also write my non-trivial ChatGPT conversations like that ^
- one of the few exceptions is Google Docs, I can directly work into that
- the reason I ended on Google Docs: after a few minutes of playing around, it's not clear to me how using your product would be significantly better for me than using Google Docs for notes (which I don't) — I can use GDocs to write roughly Markdown-equivalent structure, and there's plugins to import/export Markdown — and GDocs is backed by Google, has a working editor, apps, multi-user support, commenting, Google ecosystem integration, etc.
3.5 years solo is serious commitment. What was the hardest part ... the real-time sync or getting the editor to feel right?