I want to give kudos to two things:
1. It took you 10 months to build this. This is focused product development and craftsmanship which is very different from Vibe coding something. So let this be a reminder to all the "I can vibe code this or that in a weekend". Good products / experiences take time.
2. You've pursued building something in a space that anyone would normally dismiss right away: "Why would anyone use this? Google Docs/ Word etc already does this" or "MSFT / GOOG will destroy you". Good on you for picking something that is hard and building it well. I actually had this idea and almost built it but dismissed it myself for the same reasons as above. So reminder again for the builders in the back: Doesn't matter if there is a 800lb gorilla building this, if you can execute it better go for it.
Kudos!
How do you know? There isn't a git repo that one can see the history of, he could have coded this in one weekend and used the rest of the time doing noncoding activities. Also, he could have made the entire thing by prompting without any hands on coding at all. The fact that it is a web app with a SaaS platform (the thing that LLM-assisted coding is the best at) doesn't inspire confidence.
Have you also considered using a solution like OnlyOffice for your product? Or a "Notion-like" lib such as Tiptap or PlateJS?
I wanted to build something canvas-based, so that eliminated most of these options. I also just wanted full control of that part of my stack... it's the core product after all. There are several TipTap/ProseMirror wrappers out there already.
You should share yours though, would be interested to see
So, thoughts on a non-AI lightweight word processor.
Actually the speed is a problem when you have hundreds of pages with track changes and comments.
Maybe you should check Wordperfect or WordStar ;)
If you work towards something like google docs etc., this product feels right within your category and can work with the team features at zed to a far greater degree.
Zed also natively has AI functionality so it can work for some people and the best part about Zed is that AI functionality can be toggled off too :-)
This might as well be a billion dollar unsolved problem which the team at zed could use their expertise on perhaps. Although I suggest that maybe instead of bolting these functionalities into zed itself, maybe a zed-fork can be created for a more Microsoft word alternative?
Has someone tried at making a zed extension which can somehow be a word editor or anything similar, perhaps it might be possible within the frameworks of zed now itself but I am not sure.
I hope someone at zed team reads this and solves this problem. Zed is fantastic piece of software, thanks for making it zed team :-)
It even supports code blocks, LaTeX, and Mermaid diagrams.
Also, the passive spelling/grammar checking in the editor is powered by LLMs and completely free. It will catch mistakes that other word processors won't, such as malapropisms.
Edit: Ah I see, from the OP. Unfortunately, I think Subscription-based, web-app, and vibe-coded would individually be deal breakers. Combined indicates it's not the sort of tool I seek.
I do a decent amount of writing on my blog and for work so I was thinking, "why doesn't this product appeal to me?"
I think I'm hesitant to spent yet another monthly subscription on something. I get decent mileage just copying and pasting sections into Claude so it's hard to justify another $8 a month on another tool.
I also do a decent amount of my editing in raw markdown files and apply styling almost as a post-process. Part of the problem is that I'm always pasting documents into corporate portals (Confluence, Wiki's, Google Docs) and they don't always copy formatting in the way I'd expect. So I just write raw text and format it after paste.
I get that subscriptions turn some people off, and I'm open to other ideas of how to make a project like this financially sustainable. I don't want to do ads :)
Why don't you use your local open source llm, without the interaction of big models? I mean, more work, but you don't need to pay your cut to them. Just asking.