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Show HN: Poor man's Google Docs
- cwkoss 10y agoLooks pretty good. For an even-poorer-man's google docs, I like to keep this bookmarked: data:text/html, <html contenteditable> If you navigate to that string in your browser it gives you a blank, editable page. No saving or any fancy features, but it is pretty convenient to be able to quickly spin up a scratch pad sometimes.
- edroche 10y agoVery cool tip, although I use notepad++ for this because even if I shut everything down it saves any new tabs I opened as temp files without me giving it a second thought.
- aji 10y agothis reminds me of something I made once that was basically exactly this, but included a button you could click that would run, more or less window.location = "data:text/html," + document.documentElement.outerHTML functioning as a kind of lame save button
- ianlevesque 10y agoClever, but why? Notepad.exe, TextEdit.app, Gedit, nano are all already there - and do save if you want to after. TextEdit will even just let you quit and come back without saving and the draft is there. Leave the browser sometimes man!
- andrewla 10y agoThe nicest thing with using a shortcut like the one above is that all formatting is preserved, tables especially, but also other html elements with styling (mostly). This is very handy in a lot of contexts.
- fuck_google 10y agoThat is also something that Google Docs lacks because of the bloated NIH document editing interface.
- zatkin 10y agoHow dare you forget my favorite text editor in your list.
- dcgoss 10y agoWhich is?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
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- wingless 10y agoed.
- francium_ 10y agovim
- gravypod 10y agoCat, Awk, Grep, and unix pipes
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- gumby 10y agoEmacs. In TECO.
- dvfjsdhgfv 10y agoZile
- contingencies 10y agocopy con
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- sigjuice 10y agoAlso, a quick way to get a scratch pad in Emacs is to switch to a non-existent buffer. C-x b foo RET and type away in a buffer called foo.
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- wyldfire 10y agoWhatever you do, don't fat-finger ctrl-w or similar. :(
- koolba 10y ago> Whatever you do, don't fat-finger ctrl-w or similar. :( You could add a onbeforeunload handler to prevent that. You'll immediately recognize it from every other annoying web page that adds uses. [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WindowEventHandlers/onbeforeunload https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WindowEvent...
- nedwin 10y agoI use this Chrome extension and it has been awesome. text area + edit + save whenever you open a new tab.
- BinaryIdiot 10y agoNo JavaScript? Nice. Don't see too many functional pages without it. I don't know that I would call it a poor man's Google Docs due to the lack of equivalent features but good work nonetheless.
- combatentropy 10y ago> No JavaScript? And even these keyboard shortcuts work, at least in Chrome: Ctrl B: bold Ctrl I: italic Ctrl U: underline
- marco1 10y agoThey do not work in Firefox (and probably other browsers), unfortunately, but you can still edit the DOM in the inspector there.
- kevinwang 10y ago>No skeuomorphic paper But isn't it skeumorphic to have pages based off of real paper sizes?
- nathancahill 10y agoNo, that's just good design. The use-case seems to be for printed documents.
- throwawayIndian 10y agoGood design? No, it's just marketing-speak. Good design is one where a user doesn't lose focus from the task they had on their mind -- be it in physical realm or software. In fact for this reason alone there is no well-designed software in the world, anywhere, that doesn't rely on skeuomorphism at its core.
- justinlardinois 10y agoThis comment implies that skeuomorphism and good design are mutually exclusive.
- nathancahill 10y agoExcuse me, sir, can I introduce you to our lord and saviour Jony Ive?
- throwawayIndian 10y agoSo you think Apple's design are away from skeuomorphism? In case you do, you're very wrong and probably don't understand what skeuomorphism is.
- kevinwang 10y agoI guess my confusion is just: are we saying that white rectangles with the dimensions of paper are not skeumorphisms of paper? What, then, would skeumorphic paper be?
- elwell 10y agoMight be nice to add "outline: none;" to .page
- marco1 10y agoWhat browser are you using? Did you test this? I can't see any difference. Please note that a drop shadow has been added deliberately here.
- milankragujevic 10y agoSafari on OS X has a blue glow around the input field when focused.
- marco1 10y agoThanks, will investigate!
- GrantSolar 10y agoAs does Chrome 52 on Windows 10
- rtcoms 10y agoMy favorite is this chrome extension : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/new-tab-notes-alpha/dnghgncclglnalfilefbdpoflgajhdpo https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/new-tab-notes-alph...
- kowdermeister 10y agoIt's possible to generate PDF client side. You might consider adding that feature.
- tantalor 10y ago"Print to PDF" isn't clientside enough for you?
- justinlardinois 10y agoAs far as I know Chrome is the only browser that offers that as built in feature.
- tomsmeding 10y agoSafari on mac offers it (like everything does on mac -- it's built in)
- blahi 10y agoI just checked and Edge has it. Pretty sure every browser has it.
- marco1 10y agoYes, I really wish Firefox added this feature! As far as I know, they even have this in the Android version of Firefox. Anyway, if your operating system comes with a PDF printer or if you installed one manually, you can use the normal printing feature that every browser has.
- LukeShu 10y agoWhat are you on that Firefox doesn't have a built-in print-to PDF? On GNU/Linux, I've got a "Print to File" printer that lets me select between PDF and Postscript, even though I don't have cups-pdf installed.
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- vtempest 10y agoThis contributes nothing more than <div contenteditable> and to present this a document editor is counter-productive to users searching for something reliable. The link below shows the many shortcommings of just calling the contenteditable browser API as an emulator. For example, Google Docs does not use contenteditable at all -- for the many reasons outlined below. Building a real doc editor that functions as a widget in blogs and forums sites requires a lot more support -- of the open source alternatives, Medium is one of the best. Why ContentEditable Is Terrible, Or: How the Medium Editor Works (2014) (medium.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11487667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11487667
- marco1 10y agoIt does! You might not have looked at this closely enough, but "contenteditable" is really only one line that has been added to make the demo more useful. The real thing this is about is the CSS. There are ~250 lines that produce the correct page sizes, margins and paged content and ensure that prints are as expected.
- a_lifters_life 10y agoPretty cool - thanks!
- bryanrasmussen 10y agoI believe Google Docs is actually the poor man's Google Docs.
- rezashirazian 10y agomy wife calls Google Docs poor man's Microsoft Word.
- markwaldron 10y agoI'm a big fan of Papier for chrome. It doesn't save to your Google account so my notes on my home computer are different than my work computer, which is just how I like it: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/papier/hhjeaokafplhjoogdemakihhdhffacia?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/papier/hhjeaokafpl...
- nattaylor 10y agoIt doesn't take away from this, but because of the title: Google Docs started much like this, but eventually they gave up on plain HTML and changed to the current model which still uses the DOM but is "complicated"(tm) HTML. I can't find the link at the moment, but I think it's interesting because despite it being the simple solution, they eventually realized it was holding back adoption amongst business users. Edit: Found the article: "Babe Ruth and Feature Lists" [0] where former Google PDM Ken Norton writes: >We were relying on the browser’s rich text surface, which used HTML as the underlying data format and caused browser compatibility nightmares. You’d bold a word and then be unable to un-bold it. Bulleted lists couldn’t be edited or deleted without screwing up the whole page or turning everything into a bullet. Centering a line would often center-align the entire document. Formatting bugs had been an annoyance for Googlers, but they were fatal for groups of students who needed to print a term paper to a teacher’s exacting specifications. 0 - https://library.gv.com/babe-ruth-and-feature-lists-1818bb8c6ca8#.sq8086m2t https://library.gv.com/babe-ruth-and-feature-lists-1818bb8c6...
- paulddraper 10y agoI've had the same experience. In order to have a great cross-platform weird processor, you've got to do it yourself.
- fuck_google 10y agoIn my experience the old Google Docs worked better for (college) group work. The new one still doesn't have proper heading numbering, table editing sucks, and styling is severely limited compared to using CSS. It's also too slow/heavy for editing large documents. It seems like a case of NIH syndrome, poor product management and googlers overestimating their abilities, which has resulted in a big bloated mess that still hasn't achieved feature parity with the old one (in the places where it matters) despite years of development. In my opinion they should not have tried to imitate MS Word, but build a new kind of collaborative word processor on the strengths of HTML/CSS/JS. Now they have just a bloated slow MS Works style crippled word processor that doesn't really work for anything demanding.
- jkaptur 10y agoHere's a great technical explanation of the problem: https://medium.engineering/why-contenteditable-is-terrible-122d8a40e480 https://medium.engineering/why-contenteditable-is-terrible-1...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- stephenr 10y agoAdding content to the first "page" doesn't cause the content below it to re-flow onto the second page. Is that a bug, or is it not intended to work that way?
- marco1 10y agoThanks! This does only affect the "in-browser" view. In the print view, everything is correct. Yet, you're right in that this just isn't acceptable. The "preview" mode in the browser should work exactly like the print mode here. This is a known issue and had already been tracked here: https://github.com/delight-im/HTML-Sheets-of-Paper/issues/2 https://github.com/delight-im/HTML-Sheets-of-Paper/issues/2
- stephenr 10y agoWhen i viewed the print preview it seemed broken too - the content in the first on-screen page (which was too long) became two pages, and then in the print preview it forced a new page before the next block of content.
- CarolineW 10y agoWhat happens if multiple people load the same page and type simultaneously? I'm on a phone and can't test that for myself, but the simultaneous access/editing is what Google Docs truly valuable. Does this do that?
- marco1 10y agoGood point! It doesn't do this yet, because the focus here has been on perfect representation of pages via CSS. But using socket.io or something like this, it shouldn't be thard hard.
- CarolineW 10y agoI suspect it is harder than you think. Have a go, and let us know how you get on. I'd love to see a simple, light-weight, elegant alternative to Google Docs.
- marco1 10y agoThanks, I didn't mean it's trivial, but it's not a hard technical problem (anymore) to do that on the web. Not sure if I'll be working on this, though, because there are so many (commercial) services providing this already. Sure, you might think that Google Docs could be more lightweight and elegant, but for many people it's working fine and that 10% improvement on Google Docs is definitely too much work for a tiny open-source project. I was talking about basic functionality, just as you were in your first comment. The title of this contribution didn't talk about a poor man's Google Docs by chance.
- asadlionpk 10y agoIt's not as easy as you think. You will also need to learn something called Operational Transformation to avoid merge conflicts. http://operational-transformation.github.io/what-is-ot.html http://operational-transformation.github.io/what-is-ot.html