A Writing App That Feels Like a Printed Book

Rochester, N.Y. I wanted a place to write that didn't look like a text box. The design brief I wrote for Folio says it in five words: the aesthetic is the product. Every entry sits on a two-page spread of warm cream paper with a noise texture, a spine shadow, IM Fell English type, a three-line drop cap, a small-caps running header and italic page numbers.

Nothing on screen competes with the words. The formatting toolbar only appears as a paper-styled bubble when you select text, with chapter, section and subheading styles, quotes and highlight. Under the hood it's Next.js and Tiptap, with entries saved as Tiptap JSON through a Zustand store and autosaved 500 ms after you stop typing. All the book styling lives in about 600 lines of plain CSS, outside Tailwind, so the typography stays exact.

Entries are stories, lessons or thoughts, and they stay in your own browser, so the live version starts empty for everyone. Supabase sync, PDF export and a reading mode are in the plan but not built.