Show HN: HawkDoc – open-source Notion-style editor built on Lexical

6 points

3 months ago

I was trying to use SuperDoc for a project and kept running into limitations. Customisation was harder than expected and the performance was not where I needed it. So I decided to build my own editor called HawkDoc, using Claude as a coding assistant for a large part of the development.

HawkDoc is focused on fast document editing with zero-lag typing. Many editors re-render large parts of the UI on every keystroke or ship heavy dependencies just to support basic formatting. I wanted something simpler and faster.

Tech stack:

- Lexical (Meta) as the editor engine. Its node-based architecture avoids full re-renders during formatting operations.

- Yjs + Hocuspocus for real-time collaboration using CRDTs, allowing conflict-free document syncing.

- Redis + PostgreSQL for storage. Yjs deltas are first written to Redis and flushed to Postgres every 30 seconds so the database does not receive keystroke-level writes.

- React + TypeScript for the frontend UI.

- @react-pdf/renderer for client-side PDF export with watermark support.

What works today:

- Block based editor

- Slash commands

- Template variable injection (`{{variable_name}}` rendered as styled chips)

- Image uploads

- Markdown, HTML, and PDF export

- Auto-save

- Selection bubble menu

What is still in progress:

- Real-time collaboration UI

- Document workspace and file list

- DOCX import

- Version history

- Authentication UI (JWT backend already implemented)

Claude Code helped speed up a lot of the early development, especially when building the editor integrations and export pipeline. I would be interested to hear how others are using AI assistants when building new developer tools.

The project is MIT licensed and open for feedback and contributions.

GitHub: [https://github.com/hawk-doc/hawkdoc](https://github.com/hawk-doc/hawkdoc)

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