nowfound

Life & fun · August 17, 2025

OA

OverType – A Markdown WYSIWYG editor that's just a textarea

Hi HN! I got so frustrated with modern WYSIWYG editors that I started to play around with building my own. The problem I had was simple: I wanted a low-tech way to type styled text, but I didn't want to load a complex 500KB library, especially if I was going to initialize it dozens of times on the same page. Markdown in a plain was the best alternative to a full WYSIWYG, but its main drawback is how ugly it looks without any formatting. I can handle it, but my clients certainly can't. I went down the ContentEditable rabbit hole for a few years, but always came to realize others had solved it…

OverType – A Markdown WYSIWYG editor that's just a textarea launched on August 17, 2025 with 471 votes, #47 of 8,530 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches.

Alternativestop 1% of August 2025

In plain words

OverType is a lightweight Markdown editor built as a textarea that displays styled text while users type. It addresses the gap between plain Markdown, which looks unstyled and confusing to non-technical users, and heavy WYSIWYG editors that require large library files. The editor features synchronized live preview functionality, allowing writers to compose in Markdown format while seeing formatted output in real time without loading resource-intensive dependencies.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hi HN! I got so frustrated with modern WYSIWYG editors that I started to play around with building my own. The problem I had was simple: I wanted a low-tech way to type styled text, but I didn't want to load a complex 500KB library, especially if I was going to initialize it dozens of times on the same page. Markdown…

Does a similar job

all alternatives →
  • An open-source, collaborative, WYSIWYG Markdown editor2023 · editor.vrite.io · ▲460

    Inspired by the design and UI/UX of apps like Notion, and utility of open-source apps like StackEdit, I decided to create a minimalistic, local-only WYSIWYG Markdown editor. Some features worth highlighting: - Monaco editor and Prettier integration for code snippets - Tables (apparently the holy grail of WYSIWYG editing) - Embeds (for CodePen, CodeSandbox and YouTube, most useful for HTML or JSON exports) - Accepts Markdown paste-in, and "exports"/generates HTML, Markdown and JSON outputs - Collaboration (with real-time awareness and initial commenting system, available only when…

  • TOAST UI Editor2018 · ▲119

    Markdown WYSIWYG editor

  • OverType2015 · uniqcode.com · ▲88

    A (frustrating) typewriter simulator in your browser

  • Markdown Editor2019 · mdown.vercel.app · ▲126

    Clean, modern & open-source WYSIWYG markdown editor

  • Medium Editor2016 · yabwe.github.io · ▲266

    The dead simple inline editor toolbar

  • Typed2014 · realmacsoftware.com · ▲256

    The stunning markdown and writing app for Mac

More life & fun this month

the category →

Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part

Launched alongside, August 2025

the whole month →
  • Trace▲1,555

    Workflow Automations for the Human 👾 AI Workforce

    AI · 2025 · trace.so

  • I built the world's most impractical 1000-pixel display and anyone in the world can draw on it. It draws a single pixel at a time and takes 30-60 minutes to complete a single image. Anyone can participate in the project by voting for the next image to be drawn, and submitting images. https://kilopx.com/

    Work · 2025 · benholmen.com

  • Job boards are dead. Your network is alive

    AI · 2025 · contra.com

  • Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We are excited to launch a preview of our smallest model, which is less than 25 MB. This model has 15M parameters. This release supports English text-to-speech applications in eight voices: four male and four female. The model is quantized to int8 + fp16, and it uses onnx for runtime. The model is designed to run literally anywhere eg. raspberry pi, low-end smartphones, wearables, browsers etc. No GPU required! We're releasing this to give early users a sense of the latency and voices…

    AI · 2025 · github.com

  • I was wondering how I can arrange objects along a spherical helix path, and read some articles on it. I ended up learning about parametric equations again, and make this visualization to document what I learned: https://visualrambling.space/moving-objects-in-3d/ feel free to visit and let me know what you think!

    Life & fun · 2025 · visualrambling.space

  • For HTML Day 2025 [1], I made a web service that displays the current sky at your approximate location as a CSS gradient. Colours are simulated on-demand using atmospheric absorption and scattering coefficients. Updates every minute, without the use of client-side JavaScript. Source code and additional information is available on GitHub: https://github.com/dnlzro/horizon [1] https://html.energy/html-day/2025/index.html

    Dev tools · 2025 · sky.dlazaro.ca