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Show HN: Tomoshibi – A writing app where your words fade by firelight
I spent ten years trying to write a novel. Every time I sat down, I'd write a sentence, decide it wasn't good enough, and rewrite it.
The problem wasn't discipline — it was that I could always see what I'd written and go back to change it.
I tried other approaches. Apps that delete your words when you stop typing — they fight fear with fear. That just made me panic. I wanted the opposite: not punishment, but permission.
"Tomoshibi" is Japanese for a small light in the dark — just enough to see what's in front of you.
You write on a dark screen. Older lines fade, but not when you hit return. They fade when you start writing again. If you pause, they wait. You can edit the current line and one line back — enough to fix a typo, not enough to spiral. The one-line-back rule also catches my own practical issue: Japanese IME often fires an accidental newline on kanji confirmation.
Everything is saved. There's a separate reader view for going back through what you've written. Tomoshibi is for writing over months, not just one session. When you come back, your last sentence appears as an epigraph — as if it always belonged there.
No account, no server, no build step. Your writing stays in your browser's local storage — export anytime as .txt. Vanilla HTML/CSS/ES modules.
Try it in your browser. A native Mac app (built with Tauri) with file system integration is coming to the store.
I've been writing on it for two months.
I noticed a major problem. If I just keep writing in a single paragraph, the lines don't disappear. I was expecting it to automatically start fading the text once it reached 3-4 lines. As it is, I am afraid of adding new paragraphs because then I would 'lose' what I already wrote.
Edit: adding, it's also surprisingly... slow? I noticed some lag as I moved my mouse around. I don't know if it's because of the website or my browser (firefox) or my OS (Ubuntu) but I don't believe there's any reason for lag here so something should be fixed.
My autocorrect also didn't work. I did get the red squiggles on a misspelling but no suggestions on right click. Again, not sure if it's something wrong with the website or something with my setup (it works fine on other sites).
Thanks for the detailed feedback.
You're right about the fading — if you keep writing in one long block, lines stay. I write in short paragraphs myself, so I hadn't noticed. I'll think about how to handle this better.
On losing text: lines don't fade the moment you hit return. They wait until you start typing again. I found that fading on return alone left the screen empty at exactly the moment I needed to think.
The lag on Firefox/Ubuntu is something I'd like to look into — I haven't tested on that environment. The autocorrect issue is likely a browser limitation, but I'll see if there's a workaround.
I must say, I find the experience curious to say the least. It prompted me to write something, and I immediately got frustrated that my text was gone, followed by a feeling of "well, it was ephemeral anyway" and then finding the reader mode and say "hmmm, does that take away from the experience?". In any case, I might come back to this every now and then, nice work.
Thank you for trying it, and for staying long enough to find the reader mode.
The frustration at the start is real. It doesn't fully go away. But for me, it slowly became something else — a feeling of gently letting go of what I'd written.
I thought hard about the reader mode. For long-form writing, an app where you can never look back is just too limiting. In the end, I decided to keep both.
Fun! I came up with a similar concept - except you can only type in one word at a time. It discourages self-editing while also not being as extreme as exploding text.
https://flow.voxos.ai/
That's an interesting constraint. I also like that the blurred words stay visible — I can see how much I've written in real time. Thanks for sharing.
ちなみに、日本語のバージョンでイタリック体の漢字と仮名があることに気づきましたが、それが普段ですか？僕は日本語が下手ですが、日本語でイタリック体の字があまり使われていないと聞いたことがあるだけです。でも、やはり実践にそうじゃないですか？
You're right. Italic is rarely used in Japanese, and it seems the English styling was inadvertently applied to the Japanese text as well. I'll fix it right away.
How do I save?
Everything is saved automatically to your browser's local storage. To export as .txt, open the Read Back screen from the top right and tap the Share button. Note: the Read Back button only appears after you've written something.
Is it just me or is it weird to promote a writing app with an obviously LLM-written post.
To clarify, I write the posts myself, carefully thinking through and refining the content. Since I'm Japanese and not a native English speaker, I use AI to assist with translation.
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