Woolf: Space to Tell Your Story
We have big dreams for Woolf, but today it’s just a really great text editor.
It's a delighfully vintage desktop app that works without an internet connection. It just edits the files stored locally right on your computer like it’s 2008 and we trusted our own hard drives. More importantly though, it’s really really fast. If you’ve become impatient writing in a web app recently, you’ll love Woolf.
Woolf lets you write in Markdown or you can use a simple toolbar. If you use headers in your document, Woolf will give you a nice table of contents.
It can check your spelling and grammar, but only if you ask it to.
If you’d like it to, Woolf can also backup all of your writing to the cloud.
There’s a lot more to come, but we wanted to nail the writing experience first. I’ve written this document in Woolf. It’s been pretty nice.
Notes from Building
AI as your domain expert. The humble text editor has more going on than you’d think. There's a whole pantheon of libraries to choose from. TipTap, ProseMirror, TinyMCE. Do you want to use hunspell or aspell for spellcheck? Without AI to help research what works best for our specific needs, this would have been overwhelming. I leaned heavily on AI to help browse these new-to-me tools and find the perfect fits for our needs.
You can build in languages you don't “know.” We used Rust and Svelte for this, neither of which we really knew going in. If you understand senior engineering patterns, you can collaborate with your favorite AI agent pretty adeptly in foreign languages. This proved especially true after the release of Sonnet/Opus 4 — they have great Svelte 5 chops.
Claude Code is starting to win. Hot take: we’re putting too much emphasis on the LLM models. Should I use Opus 4 or GPT-5? It shouldn’t be a surprise, but in my experience it’s really the product interfacing with those models that makes the difference. Claude Code has great developer ergonomics, great local tooling, and is a simply a great fit for my development workflow. Taste > Benchmarks.
Writing as human expression will outlive the AI hype. This might be our little window. AI is good enough to help with the technical complexity, but not so good that people stop writing altogether. Writing as art. Writing about the human condition. Writing as connection between people. None of that gets replaced by chatbots. We don't want to hear from AI about the human experience.
Build for communities you actually want to serve. Books have changed my life, I’m sure they’ve changed yours. We wanted to build a thing for a community we love and want to serve. My dream is that authors can use Woolf to build new worlds, tell important stories, and do great work. And if I can get a trip to World comp’d by the company, that’d be great.
Want to try out Woolf? Go here.
