Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs
Hey HN! I'm Prajwal, the co-creator of Desklamp! I just completed my undergrad, which is where we got the idea for Desklamp. A bunch of friends and I built this because we hated the experience of studying on our laptops. It was boring, and we found ourselves staring at the screen for hours on end with no output to show for it. To make reading more engaging and to make sure we could remember what we read, we built a note-making system integrated with a PDF reader. The aim is to encourage you to make notes! LaTeX support, clipping out sections from the document, linking notes to sections in…
In plain words
Desklamp is a note-taking system integrated with a PDF reader designed to make studying more engaging. It allows users to annotate documents, support LaTeX formatting, clip sections, and link notes directly to PDF content. The platform includes collaborative features and quality-of-life improvements like light mode and highlight viewing. It targets students and researchers who want a more interactive reading experience with built-in accountability for capturing key information.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey HN! I'm Prajwal, the co-creator of Desklamp! I just completed my undergrad, which is where we got the idea for Desklamp. A bunch of friends and I built this because we hated the experience of studying on our laptops. It was boring, and we found ourselves staring at the screen for hours on end with no output to show for it. To make reading more engaging and to make sure we could remember what we read, we built a note-making system integrated with a PDF reader. The aim is to encourage you to make notes! LaTeX support, clipping out sections from the document, linking notes to sections in the PDF - everything is designed to really make sure you have no excuse to not make notes as you read. We've also added a lot of fixes for minor inconveniences (scrolling across sections, hitting the wrong page number, light mode, viewing your highlights at a glance). And all of this is collaborative, because that just makes notes even more useful. It's free for a while - we want to know what the rest of you think! Feedback can only help us make this even better. It's available as a web-app and a desktop app for Mac and Windows (Linux users, mail us, we're operating on a very closed beta right now).
More work this month
the category →
The app store for voice native apps that lives in your notch
Work · 28d ago · voiceos.com
The New Calendly▲211Handle all of the work before, during, and after meetings
Work · 17d ago · calendly.com
Launched alongside, July 2022
the whole month →
- PO
Life & fun · 2022 · justine.lol
- PO
Dev tools · 2022 · github.com
- PP
Hello, HN - I wanted to share this puzzle game I made during my vacation. I'm rather fond of the pipes puzzle where your goal is to restore a scrambled network of connections by rotating tiles. It's usually played on a grid of squares and this all started when I decided to make a programmatic solver for that kind of puzzle. Then I realized that with some minor changes the solver could generate new puzzle instances. I thought about what kind of puzzle to make and someone suggested a hexagonal grid. Adapting the generator wasn't too hard but then I had to create a way to play this variant. So…
Life & fun · 2022 · hexapipes.vercel.app
- PD
We're building Parsnip to create a "tech tree" of cooking skills that allows anyone to level up on the building blocks of cooking knowledge while tracking their progress over time. It took us a few iterations to figure out the right product; here's the story of our latest pivot: [https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope] The goal is to create a personalized way to learn any recipe on the Internet, then use this as a springboard to help home cooks of all levels solve the problem of repeated meal planning in a 10x better way:…
Work · 2022 · parsnip.ai