Show HN: OverType – A Markdown WYSIWYG editor that's just a textarea

Hi 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 <textarea> 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 <textarea>? If we aligned them perfectly, then even though you were only editing plain text, it would look and feel like you were editing rich text! Of course, there would be downsides: you'd have to use a monospace font, all content would have to have the same font size, and all the markdown markup would have to be displayed in the final preview. But those were tradeoffs I could live with. Anyways, version 1 didn't go so well... it turns out it's harder to keep a textarea and a rendered preview in alignment than I thought. Here's what I discovered: - Lists were hard to align - bullet points threw off character alignment. Solved with HTML entities (• for bullets) that maintain monospace width - Not all monospace fonts are truly monospace - bold and italic text can have different widths even in "monospace" fonts, breaking the perfect overlay - Embedding was a nightmare - any inherited CSS from parent pages (margin, padding, line-height) would shift alignment. Even a 1px shift completely broke the illusion The solution was obsessive normalization: // The entire trick: a transparent textarea over a preview div layerElements(textarea, preview) applyIdenticalSpacing(textarea, preview) // Make textarea invisible but keep the cursor textarea.style.background = 'transparent' textarea.style.color = 'transparent' textarea.style.caretColor = 'black' // Keep them in sync textarea.addEventListener('input', () => { preview.innerHTML = parseMarkdown(textarea.value) syncScroll(textarea, preview) }) A week ago I started playing with version 2 and discovered GitHub's <markdown-toolbar> element, which handles markdown formatting in a plain <textarea> really well. That experiment turned into OverType (https://overtype.dev https://overtype.dev), which I'm showing to you today -- it's a rich markdown editor that's really just a <textarea>. The key insight was that once you solve the alignment challenges, you get everything native textareas provide for free: undo/redo, mobile keyboard, accessibility, and native performance. So far it works surprisingly well across browsers and mobile. I get performant rich text editing in one small package (45KB total). It's kind of a dumb idea, but it works! I'm planning to use it in all my projects and I'd like to keep it simple and minimal. I would love it if you would kick the tires and let me know what you think of it. Happy editing! --- Demo & docs: https://overtype.dev https://overtype.dev GitHub: https://github.com/panphora/overtype https://github.com/panphora/overtype