The editor is designed to read like a finished page rather than a form. Line length is held to roughly 50 to 75 characters by default, the typographic range where long-form text is most comfortable to read and write.

Markdown formats as you type, so wrapping a word in asterisks turns it bold without reaching for a button. A floating toolbar appears only when text is selected, and fullscreen removes even that, leaving formatting to the keyboard.

Organization stays out of the way until it is needed. Command K opens a quick switcher that searches titles, content, tags, and backlinks at once, with fuzzy matching so a half-remembered title still lands. Notes open in tabs that survive a restart.

Wikilinks and hashtags work inline, so structure grows out of the writing itself instead of being filed ahead of time. Those links also feed a 3D graph that maps how ideas connect across the whole library.

The hardest part of writing is starting, so MyDraft gives people reasons to start. A streak tracker counts consecutive days and words written, Command D opens today's journal entry from a custom template, and a library of 365 prompts offers a new one each day.

The writing timer is deliberately gentle. When it runs out, it says time's up and invites you to keep going. It never stops anyone mid-sentence, because the point of a timer is to get someone writing, not to end it.

A quiet app does not have to be a cold one. Every launch opens on a splash screen with an animated logo and a quote. Optional keyboard sounds and a small fidget widget, seven animated loops triggered with F8, give restless hands somewhere to go between sentences.

Three themes cover different lighting. Day and Night are what they sound like. Glass uses the operating system's own frosted materials, so the window picks up the desktop behind it and feels native to the machine it runs on.

MyDraft is a desktop writing app with a web interface and a native core. The interface is a Next.js app exported to static files and rendered in the operating system's own webview. Everything that touches the disk, the microphone, or the window itself runs in Rust, and the two sides talk through typed commands and events.

Three constraints shaped nearly every decision. The files belong to the writer, so notes are plain Markdown in a folder they choose. Nothing leaves the machine, so there is no server, no account, and no telemetry. And the app can never lose a word, which turned out to be the hardest of the three.

Each note is a Markdown file with a small block of frontmatter at the top holding its title, dates, folder, and starred state. Folders in the app are real directories on disk, so moving a note in the sidebar physically moves its file. Opening the notes folder in any other editor shows exactly what the app shows.

The editor originally stored its own HTML and converted it back and forth, which is the kind of round trip that slowly corrupts formatting. Markdown is now the only format written to disk. Older HTML notes are converted the first time they are opened, and HTML is generated only on the way out, for printing.

Folder membership used to live in a single JSON map beside the notes. One damaged file could scramble the organization of an entire library, so membership moved into each note's own frontmatter, with a one-time migration and the old map kept as a read-only fallback during the transition.

Autosave waits for an 800 millisecond pause in typing, with a five second ceiling so someone typing without stopping still gets saved regularly. Every write is atomic: the note is written to a temporary file, flushed to disk, and then swapped into place in a single rename. A crash mid-save leaves the previous version intact rather than half a file.

Some of the most important code came from real reports of a note keeping its title while its body went blank. The Rust side now refuses any save that would replace a non-empty note with an empty one unless that is explicitly intended, and every save logs a length and a fingerprint of its content so an incident can be traced afterward. A recovery routine can inspect a note's temporary file and backups side by side and restore the fullest one.

Configuration files keep three rotating backups. Streak tracking updates after every save but is never allowed to block one. A failed streak count is logged loudly, and the note is saved regardless.

Speech-to-text runs entirely on the device. A streaming recognizer model ships inside the app and is driven from Rust, with microphone audio resampled to 16kHz and fed to it continuously. Partial results stream back as a live preview, and the final transcript lands at the cursor when dictation stops.

One small decision makes a real difference in use. The microphone opens before the model finishes loading, and audio is buffered in the meantime, so the first words someone speaks while the model warms up are not lost.

The window has no system title bar. Its controls are drawn by the app, so the chrome matches the rest of the interface on both platforms. Glass mode applies each operating system's own material: acrylic on Windows 11, a blur-behind effect on Windows 10 where acrylic is unreliable, and native vibrancy on macOS.

The pinnable to-do list is a separate always-on-top window that can be locked in place, so a short list can sit beside whatever else is open without pulling anyone back into the main app.

A writing app should feel the same with ten notes as it does with ten thousand. The sidebar virtualizes once a list passes 40 rows, rendering only what is on screen. Search, backlinks, and tags are resolved in Rust rather than by loading every note into the interface.

The codebase had to scale too. The main screen once held more than 40 separate pieces of local state, and the sidebar and editor had grown into single files of 53KB and 42KB. Those were split into four focused stores and a set of small hooks and components, which removed a class of bugs where one change quietly broke another screen.

Purchases run through Stripe checkout. A signed webhook verifies every payment before acting on it, and it is idempotent on the checkout session, so a retried webhook can never issue two keys. The key is generated server side, stored, and emailed to the buyer.

Activation needs the internet exactly once. The app sends the key with an anonymous machine id, receives confirmation, and stores it locally. From then on it runs fully offline, which is the only licensing model that fits an app whose promise is that it does not need anyone's server.

Filenames still carry a unique id and a timestamp ahead of the title. That keeps every note's identity stable through renames, but it makes the folder less pleasant to browse in another app, and decoupling titles into frontmatter was the first step toward fixing it properly.

Streaks are motivating, but they are also unforgiving. Missing one day resets the count, and a daily word goal or a heatmap that shows volume rather than presence would reward effort more fairly. A heading outline for long documents is also still on the list.

The main lesson is that local-first is a promise about failure, not about storage. Saving to a file is easy. Making sure a crash, a sync conflict, an empty editor state, or an external edit can never cost someone their writing is where most of the engineering went.

The same restraint drove the design. The best features in MyDraft are the ones that stay invisible until they are needed, and the hardest decisions were about what to leave out.