Show HN: BlockNote – a “Notion-style” block-based text editor

15 points

4 years ago

Hi HN! BlockNote (demo @ https://blocknote-main.vercel.app) is my shot at creating an extensible, block-based editor (similar to Notion, Coda, etc.). Featuring different block types, animations (try changing block types, indenting, etc), menus, placeholders, collaboration and more you expect from a good editor.

I'm on a journey to build a decentralized, live-programmeable and collaborative block-based editor [1] that syncs over Matrix [2], and unfortunately found that there's still not a great Open Source text editor component on par with something Notion's editor, which is why I got started with this.

BlockNote builds on top of Prosemirror [3] and TipTap [4] (two great libraries to build text editors for the web / work with ContentEditable and its quirks), but these libraries are pretty bare-bones ("headless"). While there's still some ground to cover, I hope BlockNote makes it easier to get a better out-of-the-box UX and am looking forward to your feedback!

[1] Follow along at https://www.typecell.org

[2] See this HackerNews discussion on Matrix-CRDT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29978659

[3] https://prosemirror.net/

[4] https://tiptap.dev/

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