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Show HN: Revise – An AI Editor for Documents

revise.io

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Re: Show HN: Revise – An AI Editor for Documents

#81

Post by lewisjoe »

artursapek wrote: post #35
arrsingh wrote: post #32

This looks really nice! Congratulations on building something awesome, especially in a space that's "crowded" with the big players. 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 / experien…

Thanks, that's nice. Yeah it's been 10 months, and 7 of them completely full time... living off savings. I think there's plenty of room for innovation with word processors now that we have LLMs and the big players are unlikely to go far outside the box.

This is great work. I'm curious how did you get the agentic behavior integrated into your datamodel?

1. How does the AI read your document? have you exposed a JSON/XML?

2. How is AI generating edits over the document?

3. How are big documents presented to AI? Was minimizing token consumption a goal?

Fantastic work, btw!

Re: Show HN: Revise – An AI Editor for Documents

#83

Post by thomasnowhere »

Impressive that you built the rendering layer from scratch on Canvas. Curious about one thing though, how do you handle accessibility? With contenteditable you get a lot of browser accessibility features for free (screen readers, selection, input methods). With Canvas rendering you'd need to reimplement most of that manually.

I've been working on a ProseMirror-based editor and the biggest lesson was how much the browser gives you for free with contenteditable, even though it's painful to work with. IME input handling alone took weeks to get right, and that's with the browser doing most of the heavy lifting. Starting from Canvas seems like an order of magnitude harder.

How's the IME/CJK input working? And does it play nice with browser spellcheck?

Re: Show HN: Revise – An AI Editor for Documents

#84

Post by artursapek »

thomasnowhere wrote: post #83

Impressive that you built the rendering layer from scratch on Canvas. Curious about one thing though, how do you handle accessibility? With contenteditable you get a lot of browser accessibility features for free (screen readers, selection, input methods). With Canvas rendering you'd need to reimplement most of that manually. I've been working on a ProseMirror-based editor and the biggest lesson was how much the brow…

I developed my own selection and input handling. The app focuses on a hidden input and it extracts the events when you hit keys, and handles them in my editor engine. I haven't done extensive testing but it works pretty well for foreign languages, I've even added decent support for RTL ones like Arabic.

I haven't thought much about accessibility, it's not really a priority for the project right now. If the project really gets big I might revisit that. Google docs is canvas-based, so that was enough precedent for me.

Re: Show HN: Revise – An AI Editor for Documents

#86

Post by thomasnowhere »

artursapek wrote: post #84
thomasnowhere wrote: post #83

Impressive that you built the rendering layer from scratch on Canvas. Curious about one thing though, how do you handle accessibility? With contenteditable you get a lot of browser accessibility features for free (screen readers, selection, input methods). With Canvas rendering you'd need to reimplement most of that manually. I've been working on a ProseMirror-based editor and the biggest lesson was how much the brow…

I developed my own selection and input handling. The app focuses on a hidden input and it extracts the events when you hit keys, and handles them in my editor engine. I haven't done extensive testing but it works pretty well for foreign languages, I've even added decent support for RTL ones like Arabic. I haven't thought much about accessibility, it's not really a priority for the project right now. If the project re…

That makes sense, the hidden input approach is clever. Google Docs definitely proved it's viable at scale. The RTL support is a nice touch, that's notoriously tricky to get right.

Great work pulling this off in 10 months. Good luck with the project!

Re: Show HN: Revise – An AI Editor for Documents

#87

Post by artursapek »

thomasnowhere wrote: post #86
artursapek wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I developed my own selection and input handling. The app focuses on a hidden input and it extracts the events when you hit keys, and handles them in my editor engine. I haven't done extensive testing but it works pretty well for foreign languages, I've even added decent support for RTL ones like Arabic. I haven't thought much about accessibility, it's not really a priority for the project right now. If the project re…

That makes sense, the hidden input approach is clever. Google Docs definitely proved it's viable at scale. The RTL support is a nice touch, that's notoriously tricky to get right. Great work pulling this off in 10 months. Good luck with the project!

thanks! appreciate that

Re: Show HN: Revise – An AI Editor for Documents

#88

Post by artursapek »

lewisjoe wrote: post #81
artursapek wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, that's nice. Yeah it's been 10 months, and 7 of them completely full time... living off savings. I think there's plenty of room for innovation with word processors now that we have LLMs and the big players are unlikely to go far outside the box.

This is great work. I'm curious how did you get the agentic behavior integrated into your datamodel? 1. How does the AI read your document? have you exposed a JSON/XML? 2. How is AI generating edits over the document? 3. How are big documents presented to AI? Was minimizing token consumption a goal? Fantastic work, btw!

Yeah, all of that was fun/tricky to figure out. I'm planning to start a little dev blog on Revise that will get into the weeds of how this stuff works - will share it on here when I get around to it. Too much to explain in a comment. Thank you though!

Re: Show HN: Revise – An AI Editor for Documents

#89

Post by artursapek »

relation_al wrote: post #85

Bank Street Writer was the first software program I fell in love with, 3000 years ago in the cretaceous era. When I just tried your app it gave me that same thrill, and I haven't thought about that app in 2700 years. Well done!

thank you!
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