Show HN: Leaflet.pub – a web app for creating and sharing rich documents
Hi HN!
For the last 8 months we've been working on leaflet.pub, a web app for making delightful documents. We're trying to strike a balance between Notion and Google Docs — very fast, ultralight and easy to share, but also supporting rich blocks and multiple pages.
Weirdly, none of the many notetaking/document apps that we could find hit this combination, so we made Leaflet. With it you can:
- Instantly create a doc, without an account - Share read and edit links - Sign-in with email to sync your docs to different devices - Add rich blocks, like canvases, subpages, rsvps, and polls
It's really useful for one-off collaborations, running events, or just when you need a blank page without having to buy into a whole organizational system.
We also spent a lot of time making sure Leaflets look good. We've found that there's a pretty blurry boundary between a document and a website, so making something that people can feel proud to publish online was key.
Here's a couple examples!
- Jake's presentation on Slöjd, traditional handcraft pedagogy (https://leaflet.pub/3d28b4a7-3703-4ae5-aaf6-d270ffe1151f) - Laura's documentation of her website redesign (https://leaflet.pub/14aba696-e894-440a-9d06-917641a2bfce)
Some technical details that might be interesting:
- We do sync and all our client-side state via Replicache, which I really love! - Data is modeled as a set of facts about entities, a la Datomic, forming a graph. This has been flexible enough for us to quickly build new features, like canvases and nested pages, without committing to a single document structure. - We use ProseMirror, but not for the entire document. Instead every text block is a separate ProseMirror instance. This lets us keep the document structure in our database and our schema, without having to dive into ProseMirror's every time we want to modify things.
Our (somewhat messy) source is available here: https://github.com/hyperlink-academy/leaflet if you want to dig deeper!
On the horizon:
- Better home and document organizing features — things like search, tagging, collections etc. - We're really excited about ATProto and Bluesky and are working on a set of lexicons and an AppView for document publishing! This will include a lexicon for rich text documents, as well as one publications, and some concept of memberships or subscriptions. - More blocks! Tables, code blocks, etc.
Some things we're particularly proud of:
- Our list handling - Custom theming - Keyboard handling on iOS Safari (and generally works excellently on mobile) - Side-scrolling multi-page interface - Works as a PWA!
Some things that still need work:
- While faster than others, still a lot of work we can do on performance, both speed when working with very large documents and loading docs generally - Drag and drop and selection in general could be a lot nicer - Keyboard navigation across multiple pages - Multiplayer cursors, and generally real-time sync could be sped up greatly leveraging CRDTs (we already use YJS, just could move updates around faster)
You can create a new document just by visiting https://leaflet.pub (or https://leaflet.pub/new if you're signed in) — would love to hear your thoughts and any feedback if you give it a try!
Just as an FYI: "leaflet" is the name of a popular web mapping JS library. https://leafletjs.com/
May or may not be relevant for you (and is definitely a very different field/product), but if you're releasing client libraries/SDKs of any sort, it might be good to be aware of. There's a large ecosystem of plugin libraries named "leaflet-foo" or "foo-leaflet" etc in addition to the "main" one. If you start releasing any libraries to work with your app (even if they're not JS), you'll likely want to be aware of and work around naming collisions for library names.
Either way, looks nifty!! I love the approach and we need more people willing to do something like this that competes with google docs / etc, but does so by targeting a specific use case / niche / etc and not by trying to do everything.
Leaflet looks like an amazing library. We only came across it and the naming collision after we got started, and so far haven't had too much confusion, but definitely a good idea to be aware when we do an SDK. Would love to make the confusion worse by including a map block in leaflet.pub via leafletjs someday though!
My first thought was maybe the overleaf.com people had branched-out from LaTeX documents.
Have you noticed the rampant appropriation of common words of late in HN references to products? Engine. Leaflet. Bayleaf. On and on I’ve forgotten how many I’ve seen but it’s ridiculous to think that in time, they’ll all be trademarked in the US. In short, I find it an issue with no remedy at present, yet to say it’s all well and good would be a sign of ignorance.
My first thought was a new product from the LeafLetJS people, cool.
My first thought too.
It'd be great to get code blocks and inline code blocks. Ideally using Markdown syntax. And, if possible to get syntax highlighting, that'd be even better.
But otherwise, this pretty well lines up with an idea that I had just been mulling over in the last 2 days. Which is pretty eery, but well timed. Realistically I wasn't ever going to do it, so I'm glad I may not have to miss out.
(Leaflet cofounder here) - agree, code blocks is definitely on our list! Both inline and full code blocks e.g. with CodeMirror. Ideally with syntax highlighting, just need to figure out how to play nicely with our custom themes…though probably fine to start with just a default theme.
Still playing around with it but I have to say, I absolutely adore the side-scrolling feature!
Reminds me of https://gingkowriter.com/ ... Side scrolling and spatial notetaking was the two reasons to stick with it. Perhaps it's time to switch to Leaflet.
Thanks for sharing <3
It felt familiar but yes I totally forgot about this! I used gingko for the trial period years and years ago because I was looking for a lighter Scrivener alternative.
In our last product (hyperlink.academy) we went through a lot of iterations on multipage designs, from carousels, to stacking decks, to a kind of 2-pane view, and eventually settled on the side scrolling view. Really useful for drilling down into things, looking at things side-by-side, etc. Glad to hear you like it!
Just one thing needs fixing, urgently: stop messing with the scrollbars! You should never take away the scrollbar unless you’re replacing it with some similar affordance (and even that’s iffy).
This really is a big deal. It leads to people flat-out missing that things are scrollable. Even after I noticed it was doing that in one of the demos, I missed the scrolled content in the other demo for a while.
This needs two changes: firstly, ditch the .no-scrollbar class; secondly, on your .overflow-y-scroll and .overflow-x-scroll, replace the value ‘scroll’ with ‘auto’. (It’s a case of bad naming, compounded by the advent of overlay scrollbars which make it easy to miss that it’s forcing scrollbars, not merely allowing scrollbars, and inconsistent with almost all of the rest of CSS in that a value named ‘auto’ is not the default. ‘scroll’ has only ever had approximately three rare but semi-legitimate use-cases, and at least two of them were rendered obsolete with the advent of the ‘scrollbar-gutter’ property. My personal opinion is that `overflow: scroll` should be officially deprecated, linters should error on it, and browsers should even consider replacing it with `overflow: auto` as an intervention.)
(Leaflet cofounder here) - thanks so much for the detailed feedback here, this is great context and appreciate the specifics on CSS intricacies / naming history I was not aware of! We'll take a look at improving our scrollbar handling. We like the minimalist look without but have gotten used to it and I hear you it breaks a useful and expected affordance. I think we might be able to strike a balance with just vertical scrollbars in pages + maybe eventually do a custom indicator for multi-page columns (more obvious b/c you see them open side by side, and global horiz scrollbar is a lot uglier than per-page vertical ones!)
The Make with Leaflet page is good dive into some possibilities https://make.leaflet.pub/
(Leaflet cofounder here) - thanks for sharing that, actually just finished drafting this week! It was fun to make all the different pages with different examples / themes…and also I think a nice demo of our custom domains feature :)
Btw some parts still incomplete e.g. I want to eventually fill out more detail on each page re: how Leaflet compares to other tools, and add more examples and templates. If anyone makes good ones they'd like to share publicly, glad to add!
I see its source available, which implies you’re planning on monetizing somehow, do you mind sharing any insight into what that would look like?
I’m always weary of getting involved in a new tool only for the rug pull to happen later.
Very fair question! Honestly the main reason it's source available rn instead of open source is we haven't decided on a license internally, as opposed to business reasons. As for monetization, the two areas we're exploring are publication, subscriptions to blogs, a la substack, and a "pro" tier, with better tools for managing lots of documents.
I do love it when someone does an original take on what a "document" means. I love the intellectual exploration of it. Kudos, genuinely.
(Leaflet cofounder here) - thank you, really nice to hear! It's taken us a long time and several prior products/prototypes to arrive at this, including previous attempts where we had similar aims — make nice expressive spaces for collaboration, creative work, learning — but took very different (and more complicated) directions, e.g. a multi-room chat/note hybrid app with each project as its own database, or a global wiki with live calls built in.
I think Leaflet's by far the most easy to use but also hides a lot of power and expressive potential without being overwhelming, and we're seeing more traction and cool ways people are using, so happy with it so far! In particular finding it really cool how there's a lot of space between very simple notes/docs and rich publishing that gets closer to artifacts more like whole websites but with document-like form factor. And making something that's equally nice and simple to read and to edit/collaborate on with others…a good challenge and design space to explore!
I love this a lot. I have spent a great deal of time considering digital document writing. The hybrid of document and canvas is a must and is commonly found in PKMs now (obsidian, logseq, affine). Collaboration features are also a must imo, but not often found due to it being difficult to implement and scale.
Looking forward to tracking this project! Is there a community one could join to get updates?
(Leaflet cofounder here) - thanks! It's been a lot of fun trying to strike the right balance between "just docs" and things like canvas, outliner, and more interactive social blocks, as well as minimalism vs. customizability etc.
Yes, for updates we have a newsletter here…so far sending alpha updates every week or two; may have to move it to 'beta' soon! https://buttondown.com/leaflet
Some feedback:
– When tapping on the leaflet icon in the bottom left, the whole text area is erased (Safari on iPad).
– The strikethrough icon is a bit hard to recognize, because the stroke merges with the S line. Some text editors use a different letter for that reason, for example a T, and add a small gap along both sides of the stroke to emphasize the overlay (only on the icon, not on the actual text being edited).
– Making the strikethrough line lighter than the text color is a bit unconventional, I’m not sure it helps readability. In the default text size, the line is easy to overlook, also because it is pretty thin (on a hi-DPI display). This is particularly the case on bold and/or italic text.
– No dark mode support, it seems.
Super helpful thanks!
The leaflet icon is our little watermark (which can be disabled!). Just updated it to point to https://about.leaflet.pub instead of just leaflet.pub, it was just creating a new doc every time you clicked it.
Useful feedback on strikethrough! Will review our implementation of it.
As for dark mode, you can theme your documents, and use existing documents as templates for others, so you can get dark mode that way. We could do a lot to make it easier to share and get basic themes though.
Kudos for the multiple ProseMirror instances. I'm building with ProseMirror myself and that's some nice wizardry I haven't thought of.
I can't seem to scroll horizontally very easily, like I have to middle click drag in empty space, is there any reason you are hiding scrollbars?
(Leaflet cofounder here) - sorry about that! Are you seeing that with 'canvas' pages, or multiple doc pages open side by side? What device / screen size? I haven't seen issues with horizontal scroll recently but lots of trickiness with slight differences across browsers and maybe things we can improve for particular cases.
Re: scrollbars honestly we just like the cleaner minimalist look and have gotten used to it but I hear you (+ others) that it can be annoying, we'll look into improving.
That's very impressive, super slick. The subpage preview on the parent page works so well I went digging into the source code.
That detail and then sub-sub-page preview also hooked me, great work
Guys, this is super cool. As someone building a canvas product that also has a (prosemirror) notepad I am super inspired by this. The way you can flick from a canvas on the notepad, back to the notepad, and it doesn't feel like you're locked in to any block because you can still slightly see where you came from.. love it.
All the best!
Nice, I really like it. The embedded elements like POSTS and RSVPs creates a nice shared space feel to it.
Also interesting to see that you chose WhatsApp for the RSVP element. Did you use Twilio for the integration and what was the level of effort needed?
(Leaflet cofounder here) - much appreciated; we spent a lot of time iterating building different versions of apps before Leaflet that were more explicitly around shared social spaces and communities for learning and collaborative projects, which informed some of our aims in making Leaflets both simple docs and shared spaces (lots we can improve there e.g. bringing in live presence features!)
For the RSVP block, yes we're using Twilio - right now it automatically uses SMS for US/Canada numbers and WhatsApp for int'l, bit more cost effective…I think it wasn't a huge lift technically, though took longer than expected mainly b/c we had to wait a while / re-submit some documentation etc. for approval.
> though took longer than expected mainly b/c we had to wait a while / re-submit some documentation etc. for approval.
I was specifically wondering about this :) How long is longer?
ps. I checked out your other/previous projects, very intrigued!
I wasn't the one doing the back and forth on this directly but I think it was at least a few weeks, lots of threads with support etc. Partly on us for something like business address records not matching in different places…we get it b/c I'm sure they're dealing with a ton of spam mitigation but the process could definitely have been clearer / more startup friendly.
Is it supposed to be a permanent published document? I couldn't find a delete/unpublish option. I guess retaining the first randomly generated URL can be used to delete the content, but still there is no clear way to delete, unpublish.
(Leaflet cofounder here) - this is a really good point! We actually had an explicit 'delete' button earlier but removed it temporarily b/c it was causing some confusion I think with people accidentally deleting collaborative docs for everyone and not just for themselves. So right now we have 'remove from home' but not full delete. We should add that back and see if we can improve the UX.
Right now all docs are unlisted but anyone with the link can view; we're also thinking about fully private or password protected docs (several people have asked about this) but still exploring the best approach there.
It seems an advanced version of https://txt.fyi. The balance between simplicity and experience is great. I hope you can continue with the project
The appearance (both the text font and the UI chrome icons and colors) really is not to my liking. I see that you can already change the foreground and background color of your document. Any plans to add more options?
You should be able to change all the colors in the theme options! As for fonts, currently working on adding options there! Probably not going to support custom icons though, but maybe an minimal mode (sans icons, maybe only text) could be interesting?
Are the documents encrypted? Is privacy a focus? One major reason that people want to move away from Google Docs and Notion is because of their very invasive privacy policies.
They are not and while basic privacy and security is definitely a focus (making sure random external people can't get access to your docs and account) end-to-end encryption and privacy is not. There are tools that focus on that that seem great. I think proton mail has a product in that space, and https://docs.fileverse.io/ seems interesting, and there are many more on the more notion side. We wanted to focus our efforts on the interface and experience.
All that being said, I'd love at some point to manage to get everything end-to-end encrypted, but it'll be a big lift!
If I understand correctly, you’re doing the sync client-side, meaning you don’t need the payload in cleartext server-side. In that case, it should be relatively straightforward to generate an encryption/decryption key and put it into the fragment part of the URL, so that the server doesn’t see it, and encrypt all payloads with it.
There's actually a fair amount going on server side. For one, we have server authoritative sync. There's a lot of mutations that would be tricky to reason about in purely p2p sync, and just applying them to an authoritative source makes that a lot simpler (and is what let's us use Replicache!). Beyond that though we have a bunch of features, custom domains, polls, rsvp blocks, that depend on us being able to control permissions.
It's definitely possible to do all if this in a p2p context, but it's much harder and increases the complexity a ton. It also makes it harder to be fast, you're naturally increasing the amount that needs to be done client side, and server rendering is out the door. There's a bunch of client-side editors that I think are great, and end-to-end encryption is definitely something I want to work towards, but it's out of scope for us right now.
I really love the ui exploration!
I wish canvases had edges connecting nodes
(Leaflet cofounder here) - thanks, and good idea! Yeah right now canvases are quite minimal, lots we can improve both with basics like selection/drag, and more types of canvas-specific blocks. We'd love to get some kind of freeform sketch block at some point too, though more complex, a few more frequently requested things we want to get to first, like simple tables and font options!
consider tldraw :)
This website is fantastic! I love the layout!
i thought it would be some kind of competitor to canva but not at all, the product is interesting and original, i'll definitely follow it!
my only nitpick at this moment: i like to see my scrollbars on a desktop
it is using Replicache which requires license key. is there a plan to use an alternative that doesn't require license key?
They had the licensing requirement until very recently but dropped it since they're now working on Zero (which looks awesome, but we're happy with Replicache for now). I think the docs may not be updated everywhere but see the "status" section on their homepage: https://replicache.dev/
Well done. Intuitive and simple like this sort of tool should be.
I like how it looks :)
Is there a tutorial for how to self-host it?
Not right now, self hosting isn't a priority for us at the moment. It shouldn't be tooooo difficult to figure out though, the two main infrastructure dependencies are supabase and nextjs and everything else is for additional features. I should make an example .env file to make all that clear though!
This is what notion should have been.
This is really great -- Thanks for making it.
I like the icons.
Can you edit a button after adding it?
Unfortunately not yet, we haven't come up with a pattern we like for that yet, just added buttons quite recently. Right now the move is to delete and re-add, which I know is annoying. Will improve soon!
This is fantastic. Good job. Makes you realise how much clutter is out there (SaaS nonsense, ads, paywalls, bullshit).
Loading the landing page was a breathe of fresh air. Thank you.
very beautiful and I appreciate how well everything works without logging in
Very nice work!