canvist

About five years ago I spent a year building Remirror from scratch. I wanted to make great writing experiences approachable for every developer. It was a text editor for many frameworks, built on top of ProseMirror, and quite a few open source projects and companies used it in the real world. I always dreamed of building something more ambitious.

After about two days of actual work with Claude Opus 5, I have it. canvist is a text editor built from scratch on a canvas, so I control every pixel it renders. Its new data model tracks changes far better than anything I managed in Remirror. AI is amazing, and I'll be using this in every project I build from here.

Remirror worked across frameworks. canvist works across platforms. One Rust core runs on the web (as Wasm, so it's fast), in native apps and on the desktop, and it paints everything to a canvas.

It works the way Google Docs does. It doesn't use the browser's text inputs at all. It captures events from the DOM and draws the text itself. In the past that was impossible for one person, or it took a huge team. Now it's a few prompts away, and this is what I love slop for. Slop lets me build the things I always dreamed of building.

Yes, a launch like this is worth less now. If I'd released it three years ago, it might have had 100,000 stars. Today it might not get a single one. It's still incredibly valuable.