Thymer Reviews and details

Social recommendations and mentions

• Plain Vanilla Web – Guide for de-frameworking yourself

  We're building a collaborative IDE for tasks and notes [1] from scratch without frameworks/dependencies. Not saying frameworks are never the right answer of course, but it's as much a trade-off for complex apps as it is for blogs. Things like performance, bundle size, tooling complexity, easy of debugging and call stack depth, API stability, risk of hitting hard-to-work-around constraints all matter at scale too.... - Source: Hacker News / 8 days ago

• Stop Syncing Everything

  Looks impressive! Using the VFS is such a fun "hack" :) We developed our own sync engine for an offline-first IDE for notes/tasks [1] we're building, where the data structure is a tree (or graph actually) to support outlining operations. Conflict resolution is always the challenge, and especially with trees multiple offline players can optimistically commit local changes which would result in an invalid tree state... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago

• Sync Engines Are the Future

  We've built a sync engine from scratch. Our app is a multiplayer "IDE" but for tasks/notes [1], so it's important to have a fast local first/office experience like other editors, and have changes sync in the background. I definitely believe sync engines are the future as they make it so much easier to enable things like no-spinners browsing your data, optimistic rendering, offline use, real-time collaboration and... - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago

• I wrote a static web page and accidentally started a community

  Another aspect of local-first I'm exploring is trying to combine it with the ability to make the backend sync server available for local self-hosting as well. In our case we're building a local-first multiplayer "IDE for tasks and notes" [1] where the syncing or "cloud" component adds features like real-time collaboration, permission controls and so on. Local-first ensures the principles mentioned in the article... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago

• I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps, and I can't stop

  We're building Thymer [1] for this, which is end-to-end encrypted, offline-first and optionally self-hostable. It's like an editor but you can organize anything into custom database views, we hope to get it ready soon. [1] https://thymer.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

• 5000x Faster CRDTs

  Thymer[1] uses CRDTs for everything. It's an IDE for tasks and planning. It's a multiplayer app, end-to-end encrypted and offline first, optionally self-hosted, and an entire workspace is a single graph. So CRDTs were the logical choice. All operations in Thymer get reduced to a handful of CRDT transformations. Although this was a lot of extra work up front (we're not using any libraries) the benefits make it... - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago

• Movable tree CRDTs and Loro's implementation

  We're building a new multiplayer editor for tasks/notes [1] which supports both text and outliner operations. Although it behaves like a flat text document, the outliner features essentially turn the document into a large tree under the hood. We do something similar to the highly-available move operation to sync changes: There is one operation to change the tree, called insmov (move-or-insert). Whenever a client... - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago

• Local First, Forever

  I think an important requirement for making the "forever" aspect of local-first possible is to make the backend sync server available for local self-hosting. For example, we're building a local-first multiplayer "IDE for tasks and notes" [1] where simply syncing flat files won't work well for certain features we want to offer like real-time collaboration, permission controls and so on. In our case we'll simply... - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago

• My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file

  [1]. Hopefully it's going to be useful for others working from their todo.txt/thoughts.txt! [1] https://thymer.com. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• Introduction to Loro's Rich Text CRDT

  We're working on an app [1] which needs to deal with this, but in general it also makes git less suitable for things like outliners or other collaborative text editors where people can work on lists, tables, and so on (structured data basically). [1] https://thymer.com/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

• Trade-offs between Different CRDTs

  Nice outline of the various techniques. We've built something in-between the operation-based and delta-based approaches for our offline-first multiplayer "IDE for notes/tasks" [1]. In our case we have a central server which periodically creates snapshots. Although we don't do that right now, if needed, it could delete older operations from the log for space reasons. Except for the fact that replicas encrypt their... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

• An Interactive Intro to CRDTs

  Right, there are quite some collaborative applications for which a hybrid approach is useful. We're building a collaborative editor (https://thymer.com) for example, where the underlying data structure is also a tree (as the text documents also support outliner-like features, so a flat list of characters/lines isn't enough). To avoid tree conflicts, insert and move operations look more like OT than CRDT however,... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

• Snappy UIs with WebAssembly and Web Workers

  We’re building an "IDE for notes/tasks" [1], so as an editor of sorts, UI snappiness matters a lot for us too. The approach we’re taking is to basically split up the app in two parts (we refer to these parts as "frontend" and "backend", but they are both on the client). The frontend does all the rendering for the editor, which we want to stay within the frame budget. That's why we offload all data synchronization... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago

• Reconstructing Obsidian Features in Vim and Bash

  We’re working on building an IDE of sorts [1] (but specifically for tasks/notes) trying to combine the benefits of plain text but with rich elements and structure (tree/graph). The illusion of a real editor breaks down pretty quickly when you can’t easily copy-paste or select rich elements as if it was plain text, so that’s why we’re trying to build the whole thing from scratch. [1] https://thymer.com. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago

• You might not need a CRDT

  For certain data structures the "pure" CRDT approach can get tricky. In our case, we're building a collaborative notes/task IDE [1] which is a hybrid of a text editor and an outliner at the same time. So you can perform all the usual text editor operations on a document as if it was text, but the underlying data structure is a tree (or graph really). So just like the example in article we use a hybrid approach and... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago

• Evan Wallace CRDT Algorithms

  We're using a single document tree synced with CRDTs for our collaborative task IDE[1]. All data for a team is a single tree (graph really, if you count transclusions) and its kind of magical how simple everything gets when you know all state will sync in a deterministic way between all clients. [1] https://thymer.com. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago

• Should Your Notes Be End-to-End Encrypted?

  I know I'm biased because I'm working on an E2EE todo/planning app, but over the years I've become convinced that E2EE apps are the future. All the syncing problems you have anyway if you want your app to work offline. Despite all the buzz about big data, most individuals and most companies generate only a modest amount of data. Even when you have a long tail of archived data (e.g. Emails that go back 10 years)... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago

• Local-First Software

  I think the combination of these "ideals" makes a lot of sense. If you want the combination of a web app but with native-like performance, you kind of get to many items on the list automatically. The web app we're building now is kind of like an IDE (but for tasks/planning, https://thymer.com), and obviously waiting for round-trips in an editor is no good. We thought we'd just do "some optimistic rendering" but in... - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago

• Show HN: Bike – macOS Native Outliner

  We're working on an outline app with task management/planning functionality. With end-to-end encryption and multiuser/teams support. Early beta signup at https://thymer.com. - Source: Hacker News / about 3 years ago

• Show HN: A plain-text file format for todos and check lists

  This is very cool! We're actually building an editor/IDE of sorts from scratch, but specifically for "todo.txt" (https://thymer.com if you're interested). I think a lot of parts of your spec would fit really well with the concepts we were thinking of (like the status in between [ ], due dates, #tags..). Maybe we should add compatibility for this spec as well (for things like autocomplete, and export/import).... - Source: Hacker News / about 3 years ago

• Plaintext Productivity

  Interesting, I also keep coming back to text files for productivity, because of the speed and simplicity. Some of the points the author mentions though like due dates, a journal/schedule and version history still aren’t really solved very well I think. Not to mention collaborating in a team that way (not a requirement for the author I think, but something I could use myself). I actually tried simply using VSCode... - Source: Hacker News / about 3 years ago