Lightwave
Real-time notes app, 3.5 years of hand-rolled JavaScript
Details
- External ID
- 47027463
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- —
- Website domain
- —
- Launched
- Feb. 15, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 52
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8221024258760108
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hi HN!I've been building this solo for about three and a half years. I kept trying every new project/notes tool (Notion, Asana, Trello, etc.) and always ended up back in a plain text file. I wanted something that felt like a text editor on first touch but could grow into real structure when you needed it.https://lightwave.so (desktop only)The tech stack is Laravel, MySQL, Redis, and hand-rolled JavaScript on the client. No frameworks like React/Vue/etc. ~270 lines of jQuery (out of 80k+ total LOC) for a few legacy DOM utilities, plus IndexedDB for local persistence. Real-time collaboration uses a hybrid approach: HTTP/2 POST for resilient ops + WebSockets via Laravel Reverb for live cursors, presence, and edits.This is a pre-release stress test, not a launch. Lightwave will be a paid product. Right now I'm opening it up because no amount of solo testing replicates getting punched in the mouth by real traffic.The link above has a button to create a test account in 1 click.Known rough edges: the cursor and selection system are built from scratch (like VS Code, not a contenteditable wrapper), so there's a lot of surface area. Some keyboard shortcuts may be missing. Desktop only, accessibility not yet implemented. I'm shipping fixes in real time.There's a "Submit Bug or Feedback" button inside the app if something breaks. Happy to answer any questions about the architecture, or anything else.Some highlights:- Paste markdown in, get native blocks. Copy blocks out, get markdown back.- Hierarchical document, structure. Hierarchichal file manager.- Live collab with shared cursors, selection, and presence.- Code blocks with syntax highlighting. LaTeX math blocks.- Full data export: markdown, JSON, and attachments. No lock-in.- Full undo/redo with cursor restoration.
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- real-time collaborative notes app
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes A plain-text first notes and project organization tool with real-time sync can be quickly assembled using standard web frameworks, CRDT libraries (like Yjs), and WebSocket backends.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Google Docs, remark/rehype markdown libraries, Block editors with slash menus
Concerns raised: Poor mobile experience, Not as feature-complete as Google Docs (multi-user, commenting, ecosystem integration), Editor doesn't feel like simple text files despite claiming simplicity, List left margin not aligned with page margins, Bad first impression with read-only onboarding workspace
Feature requests: Better mobile experience, Fixed-width text mode option, Keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+N for new page, Shift+Home/End for text selection, Ctrl+Backspace to delete words, Error message for unsupported browsers instead of broken rendering, Editable workspace for new accounts instead of read-only onboarding
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 49 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #14 of 50 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 107 days after the earliest competitor.
- Lightspeed, build real time apps the Laravel way (+asteroids demo) · hn · 2026-09-20 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Joonote · hn · 2026-03-21 · 54 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Build offline-first web apps in pure Go and HTML · hn · 2026-07-05 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- PhpEZ · hn · 2026-08-29 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- TomatoVynl · ph · 2026-09-10 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Smithereen · hn · 2026-05-21 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Turtle · hn · 2026-08-18 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- I vibe-coded a custom WebGPU engine for my MMO · hn · 2026-02-23 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.35
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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