Just as an FYI: "leaflet" is the name of a popular web mapping JS library. https://leafletjs.com/

May or may not be relevant for you (and is definitely a very different field/product), but if you're releasing client libraries/SDKs of any sort, it might be good to be aware of. There's a large ecosystem of plugin libraries named "leaflet-foo" or "foo-leaflet" etc in addition to the "main" one. If you start releasing any libraries to work with your app (even if they're not JS), you'll likely want to be aware of and work around naming collisions for library names.

Either way, looks nifty!! I love the approach and we need more people willing to do something like this that competes with google docs / etc, but does so by targeting a specific use case / niche / etc and not by trying to do everything.

• jpereira

  today at 6:21 AM

  Leaflet looks like an amazing library. We only came across it and the naming collision after we got started, and so far haven't had too much confusion, but definitely a good idea to be aware when we do an SDK. Would love to make the confusion worse by including a map block in leaflet.pub via leafletjs someday though!

• ks2048

  today at 2:15 AM

  My first thought was maybe the overleaf.com people had branched-out from LaTeX documents.

• ricardonunez

  today at 2:25 AM

  My first thought was a new product from the LeafLetJS people, cool.

It'd be great to get code blocks and inline code blocks. Ideally using Markdown syntax. And, if possible to get syntax highlighting, that'd be even better.

But otherwise, this pretty well lines up with an idea that I had just been mulling over in the last 2 days. Which is pretty eery, but well timed. Realistically I wasn't ever going to do it, so I'm glad I may not have to miss out.

Still playing around with it but I have to say, I absolutely adore the side-scrolling feature!

• chrismorgan

  today at 9:37 AM

  Just one thing needs fixing, urgently: stop messing with the scrollbars! You should never take away the scrollbar unless you’re replacing it with some similar affordance (and even that’s iffy).

  This really is a big deal. It leads to people flat-out missing that things are scrollable. Even after I noticed it was doing that in one of the demos, I missed the scrolled content in the other demo for a while.

  This needs two changes: firstly, ditch the .no-scrollbar class; secondly, on your .overflow-y-scroll in `overflow-y: scroll`, replace the value ‘scroll’ with ‘auto’. (It’s a case of bad naming, compounded by the advent of overlay scrollbars which make it easy to miss that it’s forcing scrollbars, not merely allowing scrollbars, and inconsistent with almost all of the rest of CSS in that a value named ‘auto’ is not the default. ‘scroll’ has only ever had approximately three rare but semi-legitimate use-cases, and at least two of them were rendered obsolete with the advent of the ‘scrollbar-gutter’ property. My personal opinion is that `overflow: scroll` should be officially deprecated, linters should error on it, and browsers should even consider replacing it with `overflow: auto` as an intervention.)

• jpereira

  yesterday at 11:04 PM

  In our last product (hyperlink.academy) we went through a lot of iterations on multipage designs, from carousels, to stacking decks, to a kind of 2-pane view, and eventually settled on the side scrolling view. Really useful for drilling down into things, looking at things side-by-side, etc. Glad to hear you like it!

• vladsanchez

  yesterday at 10:17 PM

  Reminds me of https://gingkowriter.com/ ... Side scrolling and spatial notetaking was the two reasons to stick with it. Perhaps it's time to switch to Leaflet.

  Thanks for sharing <3

I see its source available, which implies you’re planning on monetizing somehow, do you mind sharing any insight into what that would look like?

I’m always weary of getting involved in a new tool only for the rug pull to happen later.

• jpereira

  today at 12:07 AM

  Very fair question! Honestly the main reason it's source available rn instead of open source is we haven't decided on a license internally, as opposed to business reasons. As for monetization, the two areas we're exploring are publication, subscriptions to blogs, a la substack, and a "pro" tier, with better tools for managing lots of documents.

i thought it would be some kind of competitor to canva but not at all, the product is interesting and original, i'll definitely follow it!

my only nitpick at this moment: i like to see my scrollbars on a desktop

Some feedback:

– When tapping on the leaflet icon in the bottom left, the whole text area is erased (Safari on iPad).

– The strikethrough icon is a bit hard to recognize, because the stroke merges with the S line. Some text editors use a different letter for that reason, for example a T, and add a small gap along both sides of the stroke to emphasize the overlay (only on the icon, not on the actual text being edited).

– Making the strikethrough line lighter than the text color is a bit unconventional, I’m not sure it helps readability. In the default text size, the line is easy to overlook, also because it is pretty thin (on a hi-DPI display). This is particularly the case on bold and/or italic text.

– No dark mode support, it seems.

• jpereira

  today at 2:45 AM

  Super helpful thanks!

  The leaflet icon is our little watermark (which can be disabled!). Just updated it to point to https://about.leaflet.pub instead of just leaflet.pub, it was just creating a new doc every time you clicked it.

  Useful feedback on strikethrough! Will review our implementation of it.

  As for dark mode, you can theme your documents, and use existing documents as templates for others, so you can get dark mode that way. We could do a lot to make it easier to share and get basic themes though.

I love this a lot. I have spent a great deal of time considering digital document writing. The hybrid of document and canvas is a must and is commonly found in PKMs now (obsidian, logseq, affine). Collaboration features are also a must imo, but not often found due to it being difficult to implement and scale.

Looking forward to tracking this project! Is there a community one could join to get updates?

This website is fantastic! I love the layout!

Kudos for the multiple ProseMirror instances. I'm building with ProseMirror myself and that's some nice wizardry I haven't thought of.

Is it supposed to be a permanent published document? I couldn't find a delete/unpublish option. I guess retaining the first randomly generated URL can be used to delete the content, but still there is no clear way to delete, unpublish.

Guys, this is super cool. As someone building a canvas product that also has a (prosemirror) notepad I am super inspired by this. The way you can flick from a canvas on the notepad, back to the notepad, and it doesn't feel like you're locked in to any block because you can still slightly see where you came from.. love it.

All the best!

I can't seem to scroll horizontally very easily, like I have to middle click drag in empty space, is there any reason you are hiding scrollbars?

That's very impressive, super slick. The subpage preview on the parent page works so well I went digging into the source code.

• sprobertson

  today at 6:48 AM

  That detail and then sub-sub-page preview also hooked me, great work

The appearance (both the text font and the UI chrome icons and colors) really is not to my liking. I see that you can already change the foreground and background color of your document. Any plans to add more options?

• jpereira

  today at 12:11 AM

  You should be able to change all the colors in the theme options! As for fonts, currently working on adding options there! Probably not going to support custom icons though, but maybe an minimal mode (sans icons, maybe only text) could be interesting?

Are the documents encrypted? Is privacy a focus? One major reason that people want to move away from Google Docs and Notion is because of their very invasive privacy policies.

• jpereira

  yesterday at 10:59 PM

  They are not and while basic privacy and security is definitely a focus (making sure random external people can't get access to your docs and account) end-to-end encryption and privacy is not. There are tools that focus on that that seem great. I think proton mail has a product in that space, and https://docs.fileverse.io/ seems interesting, and there are many more on the more notion side. We wanted to focus our efforts on the interface and experience.

  All that being said, I'd love at some point to manage to get everything end-to-end encrypted, but it'll be a big lift!

  • layer8

    today at 2:42 AM

    If I understand correctly, you’re doing the sync client-side, meaning you don’t need the payload in cleartext server-side. In that case, it should be relatively straightforward to generate an encryption/decryption key and put it into the fragment part of the URL, so that the server doesn’t see it, and encrypt all payloads with it.

    • jpereira

      today at 2:49 AM

      There's actually a fair amount going on server side. For one, we have server authoritative sync. There's a lot of mutations that would be tricky to reason about in purely p2p sync, and just applying them to an authoritative source makes that a lot simpler (and is what let's us use Replicache!). Beyond that though we have a bunch of features, custom domains, polls, rsvp blocks, that depend on us being able to control permissions.

      It's definitely possible to do all if this in a p2p context, but it's much harder and increases the complexity a ton. It also makes it harder to be fast, you're naturally increasing the amount that needs to be done client side, and server rendering is out the door. There's a bunch of client-side editors that I think are great, and end-to-end encryption is definitely something I want to work towards, but it's out of scope for us right now.

I like the icons.

Can you edit a button after adding it?

• jpereira

  today at 5:56 AM

  Unfortunately not yet, we haven't come up with a pattern we like for that yet, just added buttons quite recently. Right now the move is to delete and re-add, which I know is annoying. Will improve soon!

Very nice work!

I like how it looks :)

Is there a tutorial for how to self-host it?

I really love the ui exploration!

I wish canvases had edges connecting nodes

The Make with Leaflet page is good dive into some possibilities https://make.leaflet.pub/

very beautiful and I appreciate how well everything works without logging in

Well done. Intuitive and simple like this sort of tool should be.

This is really great -- Thanks for making it.

This is fantastic. Good job. Makes you realise how much clutter is out there (SaaS nonsense, ads, paywalls, bullshit).

Loading the landing page was a breathe of fresh air. Thank you.