Longmatter

An IDE for long-form writing.

For writing projects with many pages and real structure: documentation sets, handbooks, books, knowledge bases. Not a notes app, and not one document at a time.

Not open yet. It is being built in the open, and where this is says how far along it actually is, including what does not work.

Longmatter with a handbook open: the file tree on the left, a page being written in the middle, and the outline, metadata fields and inbound links on the right.
The actual application, photographed rather than drawn. Every screenshot on this page is a real screen capture of the real app.

The Markdown is the document.

There is no import, no export and no conversion step. You edit the .md file that is on your disk, and it is the file that ships. Nothing rewrites your syntax behind you.

Write mode renders headings, quotes, code and tables in place while the source stays exactly what you typed. Source mode is the raw text. Preview is the rendered page. Switching between them cannot lose anything, because they are the same document.

  • Tables without typing a pipe

    A size picker inserts one, and row, column and alignment controls appear when the caret is inside it. Tidy realigns the columns.

  • Front matter as fields

    A block of YAML becomes typed controls: a toggle for a boolean, chips for a list, a picker for a date. Comments, key order and quoting all survive an edit.

  • Never required

    A novel has no front matter and is never nagged about it. The structure is generic on purpose: a docs site is one example, not the target.

It understands the project, not just the file.

This is the part that is hard to find elsewhere. A long piece of writing is a set of pages with links between them, and those links have to stay true while the writing moves around.

  • Renaming rewrites every inbound link

    Rename or move a page and every link pointing at it is updated, including the ones whose relative path changes shape. You are told how many, before you confirm and after.

  • Broken links are marked as you write

    A link that points at nothing gets a wavy underline where it is written, the way a spell checker marks a word, rather than only in a panel somebody has to open.

  • Backlinks, outline, quick switcher

    What links here, every heading in the open page, and fuzzy search across the whole folder. Project-wide search and replace writes to many files and leaves one undo.

The project metadata view, listing which front matter keys are used across the whole folder, how widely, and which pages are missing them.
One page's front matter is a form. Every page's front matter is a schema, and only the second one shows a typo in a value used forty times.

It does not lose your work.

This is the claim the whole thing is built around, so here is what it actually means rather than an adjective.

  • Saving is atomic. A write goes to a temporary file, is forced to disk, and is then renamed over the target. A crash cannot leave a half-written page.
  • An outside change is never overwritten silently. Every tab remembers exactly which bytes it opened. If the file changed underneath, the save is refused and you choose which version to keep.
  • Closing waits for the write. Quitting asks the editor to flush first, so the last edit lands instead of being dropped by the autosave delay.
  • A failed save keeps trying. With a backoff, and it gives up rather than spinning. It stays marked unsaved until it is saved.
  • A crashed browser tab does not take the edit with it. Pending work is mirrored locally and offered back, and restoring it goes through the same check as any other save.

What it does not do.

Worth knowing before you spend an evening on it. None of these is coming soon; they are choices.

  • No export. Editing the Markdown in place is the product.
  • No plugin ecosystem. An enormous surface, and it is somebody else's moat rather than ours.
  • No graph view. It demos well and is rarely load-bearing.
  • No two-way sync between a folder on your disk and anything hosted. It is genuinely hard and doing it badly loses writing.

Where this actually is

Longmatter is being built in the open and is not finished. Said plainly, because a page that implies otherwise is the kind of small inaccuracy this product is supposed to be against.

It runs. The editor works in Chrome or Edge on a folder on your own disk, and nothing is uploaded. It is not being handed out yet, because sign-up and the account it belongs to are half built and offering an editor for somebody's book before that is settled is a good way to lose somebody's book.

Firefox and Safari cannot open a local folder from a web page at all, so they need hosted projects. The storage behind those is built and running; the editor has no way to open one yet, and no sign-in screen to get there. That is the next thing, and until it is done this product does not work in either browser.

The Mac app exists and is not downloadable yet: it is unsigned, and handing somebody an unsigned build of an editor for their book is not a good introduction.

There is nothing to pay for yet. When there is, the price will be on this page before it is on an invoice. The editor on your own folder is the part that will stay free, because it costs nothing to run; hosted projects are what a subscription buys.