Show HN: BufferTab – minimal Markdown editor that lives in the browser's URL

4 points by surrTurr 1 month ago | 6 comments
Hi HN!

I just wanted to share this little website I built (mainly for myself).

It's a tiny markdown editor in your browser! The content gets persisted in the url of the page, which means you can easily share it with others or send it to your other devices.

As someone with many tabs open all the time, I find having such a scratchpad really valuable in my daily workflow.

Furthermore, it offers Speech-To-Text via OpenAI Whisper. Simply enter your OpenAI API key (it get's stored locally in the browser) and you can start talking!

  • atmanactive 1 month ago
    This is great!

    It would be even more useful if it had a pure playback mode, controlled by a simple query parameter. That way, we could create a document and send it to someone, and they would see just the view, no editing, no toolbar, full read-only. Then, if they would want to edit it, they could manually remove that query parameter (or press some key combination), and then it would unlock into fully editable mode (like it is right now).

    • surrTurr 1 month ago
      you can toggle the edit mode to be just 'view' by pressing the edit button in the bottom right two times (alternative: cmd + e x2)

      the edit mode gets persisted in the url as well!

      • atmanactive 1 month ago
        Great. So, if I understand correctly, I would click on edit two times to get to view-only mode, the URL would change to reflect that, then I can send it to someone, and they would see the view-only mode. How can they then switch back to edit mode, if desired?
        • atmanactive 1 month ago
          I'll answer my own question: by clicking again on the toolbar "view" button.

          But that's not what I'm talking about.

          I would like to have one more mode, let's call it "read-only" which would look like "view" mode but it would have the toolbar hidden.

          This is about a use case where I would send some page/information to my mother, without having to explain what is the eye button and what is the microphone button.