Show HN: BufferTab – minimal Markdown editor that lives in the browser's URL
4 surrTurr 6 5/26/2025, 11:58:46 AM github.com ↗
Hi HN!
I just wanted to share this little website I built (mainly for myself).
It's a tiny markdown editor in your browser! The content gets persisted in the url of the page, which means you can easily share it with others or send it to your other devices.
As someone with many tabs open all the time, I find having such a scratchpad really valuable in my daily workflow.
Furthermore, it offers Speech-To-Text via OpenAI Whisper. Simply enter your OpenAI API key (it get's stored locally in the browser) and you can start talking!
It would be even more useful if it had a pure playback mode, controlled by a simple query parameter. That way, we could create a document and send it to someone, and they would see just the view, no editing, no toolbar, full read-only. Then, if they would want to edit it, they could manually remove that query parameter (or press some key combination), and then it would unlock into fully editable mode (like it is right now).
the edit mode gets persisted in the url as well!
But that's not what I'm talking about.
I would like to have one more mode, let's call it "read-only" which would look like "view" mode but it would have the toolbar hidden.
This is about a use case where I would send some page/information to my mother, without having to explain what is the eye button and what is the microphone button.
for example, a share button with the option to share it as readonly (and without any GUI)
But still being able to pull it back to edit mode by hitting CTRL+E. Although, that keypress can't really be executed on mobile, so it would be great if manually manipulating the URL could achieve the same thing. Or any other convenient way you can think of on mobile.