Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

I'm working on Gorby [0], a text analyzer app I've been building for almost 2 years now. Think of it as a mix between Hemingway editor, Prowritingaid and Readable, but with focus on features I care about more. Lately I've just been polishing existing features, like adding some subtle animations to the sidebar icons last week. I'm thinking of adding an integration with local LLMs to it too.

I'm also building a customer support app when I'm taking a break from Gorby. The idea is to make it easier to organize and quickly find/copy useful replies, discounts, screenshots etc. It's similar in concept to text expander apps, but those never worked great for me, I either forget the triggers or don't bother storing things I don't use daily. You could probably use Notion for this too, but to me it's too clunky and slow.

[0] https://gorby.app/

Gorby looks interesting. Any future potential for operating on local markdown files?

Thanks! I built the editor using Tiptap (https://tiptap.dev/) which doesn't support Markdown out of the box. However, since it can detect Markdown shortcuts (#, ##, >, etc.), it should be possible to convert a markdown file into rich text, and then when done writing and editing convert it back into markdown, while limiting formatting options only to ones that are available for both. I think Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/) does something similar.

I'll think about this for sure, especially since I've been thinking of making it possible to save and read local files. If you'd like to try Gorby, send me an email and I'll be happy to give you a free license code :)