news.ycombinator.com• Aug 17, 2025• 1 min read
Show HN: OverType – A Markdown WYSIWYG editor that's just a textareaHi HN! I got so frustrated with modern WYSIWYG editors that I started to play around with building my own.The problem I had was simple: I wanted a low-tech way to type styled text, but I didn't want to load a complex 500KB library, especially if I was going to initialize it dozens of times on the same page.Markdown in a plain was the best alternative to a full WYSIWYG, but its main drawback is how ugly it looks without any formatting. I can handle it, but my clients certainly can't.I went down the ContentEditable rabbit hole for a few years, but always came to realize others had solved it better than I ever could.I kept coming back to this problem: why can't I have a simple, performant, beautiful markdown editor? The best solution I ever saw was Ghost's split-screen editor: markdown on the left, preview on the right, with synchronized scrolling.Then, about a year ago, an idea popped into my head: what if we layered a preview pane behind a ? If we aligned them perfectly, then even thoug
