Show HN: SmallDocs - Markdown without the frustrations
SmallDocs is a CLI and web app designed to provide instant, private, and elegant previews of Markdown files by leveraging client-side rendering and URL fragments.
Hi HN, I’d like to introduce you to SmallDocs. SDocs is a CLI + webapp to instantly and 100% privately elegantly preview and share markdown files.
The more we work with command line based agents the more .md files are part of our daily lives. Their output is great for agents to produce, but a little bit frustrating for humans: Markdown files are slightly annoying to read/preview and fiddly to share/receive. SDocs was built to resolve these pain points.
If you run the sdoc command after installation, it instantly opens in the browser for you to preview with nice default styling and you can immediately share the url. The .md files our agents produce contain some of the most sensitive information we have (about codebases, unresolved bugs, production logs, etc.). For this reason 100% privacy is an essential component of SDocs.
To achieve this, SDoc urls contain your markdown document's content in compressed base64 in the url fragment (the bit after the #). The cool thing about the url fragment is that it is never sent to the server. The webapp is purely a client side decoding and rendering engine for the content stored in the url fragment. This means the contents of your document stays with you and those you choose to share it with.
Because .md files might play a big role in the future of work, SDocs wants to push the boundaries of styling and rendering interesting content in markdown files. You can add complex styling and render charts visually. If you share a SDocs URL, your styles travel with it because they are added as YAML Front Matter to the markdown file.
We've been putting this project to the test at work. My team and I have found SDocs to be particularly useful for sharing agent debugging reports and getting easily copyable content out of AI tools. To encourage our agents to use SDocs, we add a few lines about them in our root agent files.
Regarding implementation: We encrypt your document client side. The encrypted document is sent to the server with an id to save it against. The encryption key stays client side in the URL fragment. You can test this by inspecting the network request body, which shows a base64-encoded blob of random bytes, not your document.
Source: Hacker News
