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Thymer
Company blog · thymer.com · on HN as wimproductivityprogramming
Thymer is the company blog at thymer.com, writing about productivity and programming. Since 2009, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 44 times, most often “Local-First and Ejectable”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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44mentions?
10HN people?
2009–2026first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Thymer is a task, notes and planning tool. HN commenters mention it as a fast, dependency-free ES6 app and as a project and task list, but the comments are about the product rather than writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Thymer is a beautiful editor to write, outline and plan at the speed of thought. Real-time multiplayer, malleable with plugins and themes, open to your agents through plain files. End-to-end encrypted, on web, desktop and mobile.
Most-linked posts?
- /3 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2022-02-21
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-02-11
- Local-First and Ejectable2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-12-09
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-10-20
- Ejectable Apps2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-12-05
What Hacker News says?
We're working on an "IDE for notes/tasks" [1] in the space of Notion and so on where you can easily self-host the sync backend with a single binary. The idea is that you can choose between cloud or self-host (and "eject" at any time to switch between the two if you ever change your mind). We hope that might be a good balance between some companies or individuals wanting to self-host but still making it accessible wh…
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on “Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline”Submitted Local-First and Ejectable as a story · 139 points
HN discussionI love it! All ES6, no deps.. probably makes your lives harder than they should be but in the name of pureness and badassery and complete control over performance, awesome! You choose to suffer for the right reasons. Wishing you the best of luck and that I can try it soon. Forgot to say.. I very much admire and appreciate the aspect of "ejectability". More software should strive for this ideal. https://thymer.com/ej…
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on “Plain Vanilla Web”Submitted Ejectable Apps as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWe're building a collaborative IDE for tasks and notes [1] from scratch without frameworks/dependencies. Not saying frameworks are never the right answer of course, but it's as much a trade-off for complex apps as it is for blogs. Things like performance, bundle size, tooling complexity, easy of debugging and call stack depth, API stability, risk of hitting hard-to-work-around constraints all matter at scale too. [1…
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on “Plain Vanilla Web”Submitted Local-First and Ejectable as a story · 1 points
HN discussionCombining the feel of plain text with real structure is also exactly why we're building an "IDE but for tasks/notes" [1]. With structured apps (task managers, outliners) you lose the illusion of editing plain text, but plain text alone lacks things like structure, links, dates, and collaboration. We've spent the last few years building an editor completely from scratch to keep the ease of text editing while adding p…
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on “I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file”A backend can be part of the functionality though, such as for real-time collaboration and syncing. But you can have ownership and longevity guarantees for both the data and the service as long as you can eject [1] from the cloud and switch to self-host or back at any time, which is what we do for our notes/tasks IDE [1] https://thymer.com/local-first-ejectable
Comment linking /local-first-ejectable
on “Local-first software (2019)”We're building Thymer [1] for this, which is end-to-end encrypted, offline-first and optionally self-hostable. It's like an editor but you can organize anything into custom database views, we hope to get it ready soon. [1] https://thymer.com/
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on “I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps”I think an important requirement for making the "forever" aspect of local-first possible is to make the backend sync server available for local self-hosting. For example, we're building a local-first multiplayer "IDE for tasks and notes" [1] where simply syncing flat files won't work well for certain features we want to offer like real-time collaboration, permission controls and so on. In our case we'll simply allow…
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on “Local First, Forever”Looks impressive! Using the VFS is such a fun "hack" :) We developed our own sync engine for an offline-first IDE for notes/tasks [1] we're building, where the data structure is a tree (or graph actually) to support outlining operations. Conflict resolution is always the challenge, and especially with trees multiple offline players can optimistically commit local changes which would result in an invalid tree state o…
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on “Stop syncing everything”We're working on an outline app with task management/planning functionality. With end-to-end encryption and multiuser/teams support (you can see other users type like Google Docs). Early beta signup at https://thymer.com
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on “Show HN: Bike – macOS Native Outliner”It's something I also tried to do for a while, just by using VSCode and a bunch of text files. I really like the lightweight-ness of just being able to edit as if it's text, but wanted to have for tasks what VSCode has for code: command palettes, "syntax highlighting", jump to "references" (like dates) and an editor which understands structure (like an outliner, but without all the awkward text selection issues). An…
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on “My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)”We're building https://thymer.com/ to do this. Real-time collaboration, local-first + end-to-end-encrypted (and optionally self-hosted).
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on “Ditching Obsidian and building my own”This is very cool! We're actually building an editor/IDE of sorts from scratch, but specifically for "todo.txt" ( https://thymer.com if you're interested). I think a lot of parts of your spec would fit really well with the concepts we were thinking of (like the status in between [ ], due dates, #tags..). Maybe we should add compatibility for this spec as well (for things like autocomplete, and export/import). Thanks…
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on “Show HN: A plain-text file format for todos and check lists”Hey thanks for mentioning us! With Thymer we really care about performance, but Thymer is also end-to-end encrypted because we don't want to compromise on privacy. And it's real-time collaborative and offline first. Thymer has optional self-hosting. Then you can upgrade (or not) at your own leisure, or intentionally stick to an older version you like better. Enshittification is a big problem in our industry. We've a…
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on “Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network”Most intriguing thing in that vein I've seen: https://thymer.com (haven't used it, am not affiliated, just looked promising in a demo video esp. on performance grounds)
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on “Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network”We've built a sync engine from scratch. Our app is a multiplayer "IDE" but for tasks/notes [1], so it's important to have a fast local first/office experience like other editors, and have changes sync in the background. I definitely believe sync engines are the future as they make it so much easier to enable things like no-spinners browsing your data, optimistic rendering, offline use, real-time collaboration and so…
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on “Sync Engines Are the Future”Thymer[1] uses CRDTs for everything. It's an IDE for tasks and planning. It's a multiplayer app, end-to-end encrypted and offline first, optionally self-hosted, and an entire workspace is a single graph. So CRDTs were the logical choice. All operations in Thymer get reduced to a handful of CRDT transformations. It doesn't matter whether you are moving or copying text, changing "frontmatter" attributes, dragging card…
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on “Faster CRDTs (2021)”We're building a new multiplayer editor for tasks/notes [1] which supports both text and outliner operations. Although it behaves like a flat text document, the outliner features essentially turn the document into a large tree under the hood. We do something similar to the highly-available move operation to sync changes: There is one operation to change the tree, called insmov (move-or-insert). Whenever a client is…
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on “Movable tree CRDTs and Loro's implementation”- jd · 2010-02-25
We've been using a similar approach for Thymer since the beginning and we've always had a really good conversion rate (conversion between visitors and signups): http://thymer.com/try/ Using a little creativity in the design, even for forms that users fill in only once has been a great way for us to set ourselves apart.
Comment linking /try/
on “"Mad Libs" Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%” Another aspect of local-first I'm exploring is trying to combine it with the ability to make the backend sync server available for local self-hosting as well. In our case we're building a local-first multiplayer "IDE for tasks and notes" [1] where the syncing or "cloud" component adds features like real-time collaboration, permission controls and so on. Local-first ensures the principles mentioned in the article lik…
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on “I wrote a static web page and accidentally started a community (2023)”Interesting, I also keep coming back to text files for productivity, because of the speed and simplicity. Some of the points the author mentions though like due dates, a journal/schedule and version history still aren’t really solved very well I think. Not to mention collaborating in a team that way (not a requirement for the author I think, but something I could use myself). I actually tried simply using VSCode for…
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on “Plaintext Productivity”Another issue which git won't solve is if you collaborate on text which has "structure". For example when merging indented (todo) lists as flat text, bullets might end up in the wrong place, e.g. [ ] Project [ ] Don't do this [ ] Task A While offline, user #1 adds '[ ] Task B' and '[ ] rm -rf /' under "Don't Do This", while user #2 adds '[ ] Do This' under 'Project'. Obviously you don't want to merge this as: [ ] Pr…
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on “Loro's rich text CRDT”We're building a new multiplayer IDE but for docs/tasks [1]. Local-first, real-time collaborative and end-to-end-encrypted sync. Not open source but self-hostable with a single binary and hackable with plugins (custom properties, views, code, etc). [1] https://thymer.com
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on “I built a faster Notion in Rust”I think the combination of these "ideals" makes a lot of sense. If you want the combination of a web app but with native-like performance, you kind of get to many items on the list automatically. The web app we're building now is kind of like an IDE (but for tasks/planning, https://thymer.com ), and obviously waiting for round-trips in an editor is no good. We thought we'd just do "some optimistic rendering" but in…
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on “Local-First Software (2019)”Nice outline of the various techniques. We've built something in-between the operation-based and delta-based approaches for our offline-first multiplayer "IDE for notes/tasks" [1]. In our case we have a central server which periodically creates snapshots. Although we don't do that right now, if needed, it could delete older operations from the log for space reasons. Except for the fact that replicas encrypt their op…
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on “Trade-offs between Different CRDTs”I know I'm biased because I'm working on an E2EE todo/planning app[1], but over the years I've become convinced that E2EE apps are the future. All the syncing code you have to write anyway if you want your app to work offline. Despite all the buzz about big data, most individuals and most companies generate only a modest amount of data. Even when you have a long tail of archived data (e.g. emails that go back 10 yea…
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on “Should notes be end-to-end encrypted?”We’re working on a new IDE but for tasks/notes [1] which is end-to-end-encrypted and optionally self-hostable [1] https://thymer.com
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on “Knowledge Management in the Age of AI”Anyone else using http://www.thymer.com ? Super easy 2d (team members and projects) task list! Any feature comparison?
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on “Introducing Asana: The Modern Way to Work Together”
