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Comment by vallode | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, I have a bookmarklet with these contents:

  data:text/html,<body contenteditable style="line-height:1.5;font-size:22px;max-width:75ch">type here...

I use this _all_ the time for very quick note taking and writing that will later be copied elsewhere, think one to three sentences and then offload.

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I just hit Win+K, and my OS runs a simple text editor of my choice for me.

Maybe I'm getting old, but using a browser for something you have available natively seems like an antipattern to me.

Those type of people live and work in the browser. Everything's a PWA. Little to no native app use. Like to manage apps (windows) by browser tab management instead of OS management. At least it's consistent across devices!

I'd consider doing that if I could rely on the browser not losing state after OS restart, browser restart, unexpected forced browser restart because of some autoupdate bullshit, accidental refresh, automatic unloading of tabs, badly thought-out shortcut for closing the browser window, unexpected update of the web page/PWA into which I typed something, accidental cookie wipe, certificate expiry, lack of reliable form of local storage[0], and a bunch of other things that make me consider everything in the browser ephemeral unless stored on a server.

(I'm not a browser fan, but even in my weaker moments, this one thing is what stops me from fully embracing living in browser.)

[0] - AFAIK there's still nothing in the browser one could reliably use to get the equivalent of persisting data to a hard drive. There's like 5 different mechanisms that could allow it, if you could rely on any of them, and of course none of them are user-inspectable except through dev tools.

But literally everything you describe is worse outside of the browser.

My browser does a better job of retaining state than most of my apps. My desktop apps have clunkier auto-update than my browser. My browser apps auto-save to the cloud, my desktop ones often don't auto-save at all.

I'm talking strictly client side. I literally said "unless stored on a server", and let me remind everyone that "cloud" just means other people's computers.

(Also that "serverless" really means "there actually is a server, but you don't get to manage it".)

Desktop apps can save files and read files. That alone puts them miles ahead of any purely client-side app. As for convenience, most apps today auto-save stuff when you're not looking, but lack of that feature isn't a big deal for me - I started using computers some 25 years ago, so I habitually press "CTRL+S" every couple seconds without even realizing it.

Nice. I'll have to look into how localStorage works in such contexts, and if that is not badly maybe knock together a bookmarklet that does that but keeps text in case I accidentally close the window before I should (or Windows, when I'm using that, decides to reboot, as it is wont to do).

Oh thanks, that's genius! I just modified it to be monospace and I can guarantee you it'll be my new favorite bookmark.

Too bad its contents won't persist across a restart or accidental close tab, but as a scratch pad it's fantastic.

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