Quietype

Quietype started as a personal tool to solve a specific problem: I kept losing focus in my text editor. Not because the editor was bad, but because editors designed for code are also designed to show you information about code while you write. Bracket matching. Type hints. File trees. All useful when coding. All distracting when writing.

The simplest possible solution was a full-screen text area with no chrome. Quietype is that solution with a few additions: Markdown rendering on a toggle, local file storage, and a typeface chosen for long-form reading.

What it does

Opens to a blank page. You type. When you stop, it saves. Files are plain Markdown, stored wherever you tell it to store them. There is no account, no sync service, no cloud. The file is the thing.

A keyboard shortcut toggles between editing mode (raw Markdown) and reading mode (rendered HTML). Both modes fill the screen. Nothing competes for your attention.

What it does not do

Quietype does not have a file browser. It opens one file at a time. It does not have themes, plugins, or a settings screen with more than three options. Features that would require network access are not in scope.

Why local-first

Every distraction-free writing app I found stored content in a proprietary format or required an account. The ones that stored plain text had sync features that needed a cloud service to work. I wanted something where the answer to “where is my writing” was “in a folder on my computer, in files I can open with any text editor.”

Plain text and a local file are the most durable storage format there is. Quietype is a thin wrapper around that.