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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.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a content generation tool for Government yet.