Show HN: Kraa.io – Markdown editor for notes, blogs, chats
45 levmiseri 20 5/21/2025, 5:22:24 AM kraa.io ↗
Hi HN! Excited to share the public beta of Kraa – a web-based markdown editor.
It's aiming to be distraction-free and has strong separation of the document's styling from the experience of writing it — while still alowing for rich customization. Example of a leaf with custom styles: https://kraa.io/kraa/examples/echolibrary
Curious about your feedback in hopes of improving Kraa before the planned launch later this year.
I don't get why I would need a web-based editor (markdown or other formats). I can perhaps see the point in a collaboration editor, but that's a special case.
Where's the "save" button? Where is my stuff stored? After clicking around a bit I got stuff in the edit mode and now I can't get back to the frontpage.
Perhaps this is an age thing, but files goes on my hard drive, I organise them using a file manager. Files shouldn't be stuck in a browser.
It says I can write blog posts, but how do I export files to my blog? Is there Wordpress integration? Git?
We will have markdown / keep / ... import of the notes, a bit later, but that is not probably what You meant with file uploads. The front-page navigation needs care, thx for feedback.
No the import of notes is not what I had in mind :-) I always want to be storing files locally, or on a network share. Having this being intended as a collaboration tool makes sense, but if I'm the sole user, then it's just another place to store my files, which can't be shared or accessed by any other tool. That's my objection, and why I question the usefulness of something like this. You're siloing of data, which makes no sense to me (well it doesn't, it's the only way this can really work in the browser).
My question about the usefulness is sincere. I truly don't get why anyone would want to work in the browser like this, but I also dislike Google Docs. I'm just not the target audience, so I struggle to see how or why something like this would be useful.
The functionality is really well done, I'd just wish it was a desktop application, and stored files on my hard drive.
For me, the valuable usecases for kraa are: small notes shared accross devices/people (desktop/phone, family todos), pw-protected gallery for family, and the possibility to turn a note into a BS-free nice blog post super easily. The BS-free aspect is important, but it also means we will be compromising on features (compared to notion/wp/..).
EDIT (adding):
Also, as for the desktop application storing files localy - we do not plan that now, it is too much of a stretch from colab web app :-) We will however probably support localStorage offline mode & p2p / encrypted documents, but that is still something else.
Kind regards!
EDIT: repro: seems like spa app tries to be smart about browser.history - just click random things and try to use back button
We are also not trying to be a Notion clone/alternative, but rather a different kind of text editor that's highly customizable, has unique features (like the writer role) and keeps strong division between writing and styling.