Tomoshibi
A writing app where your words fade by firelight
Details
- External ID
- 47197735
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Tomoshibi
- Website domain
- in-hakumei.com
- Launched
- Feb. 28, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 25
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7230458221024259
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
I spent ten years trying to write a novel. Every time I sat down, I'd write a sentence, decide it wasn't good enough, and rewrite it.The problem wasn't discipline — it was that I could always see what I'd written and go back to change it.I tried other approaches. Apps that delete your words when you stop typing — they fight fear with fear. That just made me panic. I wanted the opposite: not punishment, but permission."Tomoshibi" is Japanese for a small light in the dark — just enough to see what's in front of you.You write on a dark screen. Older lines fade, but not when you hit return. They fade when you start writing again. If you pause, they wait. You can edit the current line and one line back — enough to fix a typo, not enough to spiral. The one-line-back rule also catches my own practical issue: Japanese IME often fires an accidental newline on kanji confirmation.Everything is saved. There's a separate reader view for going back through what you've written. Tomoshibi is for writing over months, not just one session. When you come back, your last sentence appears as an epigraph — as if it always belonged there.No account, no server, no build step. Your writing stays in your browser's local storage — export anytime as .txt. Vanilla HTML/CSS/ES modules.Try it in your browser. A native Mac app (built with Tauri) with file system integration is coming to the store.I've been writing on it for two months.https://tomoshibi.in-hakumei.com/app/
Enrichment
- Theme
- typography and unicode text tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Content generation
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- writing app with fading text effect
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes The app is a minimal text editor where typing triggers CSS fade animations on previous text lines, easily built in an afternoon with standard web tech.
Discussion
12 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Flow (voxos.ai) - one word at a time typing constraint
Concerns raised: Text doesn't fade in single long paragraphs, creating fear of losing content, Performance lag on Firefox/Ubuntu browsers, Autocorrect/spell-check not working properly, Reader mode may undermine the ephemeral writing experience, LLM-written promotional post seems inauthentic for writing app
Feature requests: Auto-fade lines after 3-4 lines regardless of paragraph breaks, Spell-check/autocorrect suggestions on right-click
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 74 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #31 of 75 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 113 days after the earliest competitor.
- Hibiki · ph · 2026-09-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Ichinichi · hn · 2026-03-14 · 136 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Learn Japanese contextually while browsing · hn · 2025-12-17 · 92 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Reproof · hn · 2026-08-18 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- hibi · github · 2026-09-17 · 36 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Moji · hn · 2026-03-06 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- I built the literal Duolingo Killer · hn · 2025-11-25 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Still Me · ph · 2026-09-26 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a content generation tool for Government yet.