No, ed(1) is the simplest and the standard text editor. And it has more than 16 users.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

The source code to ed(1) is substantially harder to memorize, and the mobile experience is sub-par. ed(1) may seem to have strong user metrics, but they’re artificially inflated by users who don’t know how to close it and thus have kept the same session open since the early 1970s, making it difficult to inform them of other options.

> the mobile experience is sub-par

To be fair, your editor’s tty experience is pretty much nonexistent. Tty is surely more important than mobile, don’t you think?!

Now, data:text/html, <textarea> at least works with w3m, but when I try to edit the textarea (surprise!) it just launches ed(1).

ed shines on movile on advanced usage, much more than any other editor.

Butterflies are actually pretty complex, especially relative to their usage as editors.

If it's so good, how many monthly active users does it have?

Based on upvotes, at least 16. Once the current funding round is over we’ll have more time for user acquisition but right now we just want to deliver a solid MVP.

Time to throw some ads and analytics in there! Maybe even an autoplay video in there!

UI is too complicated for me to comprehend. I need 3 animated generic icons on a Bootstrap site to explain all the features

I'm going to need to upgrade it to an electron app so users can create and add plugins ... also some sort of signup/login system so they can receive useful update emails and monthly newsletters

And machine learning! ML makes everything better!

Expanded a bit for a fancy title:

  data:text/html, <html contenteditable><head><title>InstaEdit

The corresponding .app-tld is available. Should help with VC.

For better obfuscation (competitors!), here is a base64 version:

  data:text/html;charset=utf-8;base64,PGh0bWwgY29udGVudGVkaXRhYmxlPjxoZWFkPjx0aXRsZT5JbnN0YUVkaXQ=

P.S.: Doesn't work on IE.

To those who want an automatic focus to the editable area after opening the bookmark:

    data:text/html, <html contenteditable><script>document.querySelector('html').focus()</script></html>

Why does it need to bloat to nearly twice the size for a simple feature? This is becoming Electron all over again.

Ok, I've taken "world's simplest" out of the title, since it's baity and obviously editorialized (which breaks the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and leads to maybe not the optimally interesting discussion.

Should I feel dumb about not quite understanding why this url works?

Not at all. It’s called a data URI, and most people will never have any reason to think about them. They’re mostly useful for inlining very small icons in CSS files as hexdumps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme

You often see these data URLs used with a different content type and more usually a base64 encoded blob, often an image.

Nah, my browser tells me it's insecure.

Did you link to it? We don’t support being linked to, which admittedly is a concern for SEO down the road.

It works in Chrome, and Firefox claims to support data URIs when directly navigated to by the user. Are you on Edge? If it lets you override the warning you should be fine.

There’s no substitute for a thorough audit of course, but if you’re worried you’ve been MITM’ed the MD5 is:

  5ad110542ebf6a3fbae7840260b0bee5

> the MD5 is:

I giggled! ^_^

It depends on what you type in I guess...

Even IE6 supported this, apparently

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att...

It needs a browser which is a lot more hungry than notepad.exe

Agreed. When I consider the complexity of a piece of software, I always take into account the conceptual weight of all the stack behind it, down to ubiquitous basic constructs like primitive types, conditional operators, etc (but simple binary size can be an easier indicator).

Otherwise it's like saying that an application is simpler because its launch command name is shorter.

That is actually very cool!

I personally use my own chat in Slack to take random notes, and of course it saves them, but I also cannot open it as easily.

Just added this to my bookmarks bar. Super handy as a quick scratch pad.

I bookmarked this.. Can I open the URI in a new tab?

Hold ctrl (on Windows) or cmd (on Mac) when clicking the bookmark.

It’s actually tricky to open a data URI in a new window using JS, in a bookmarklet or elsewhere. Browsers block it because it can be a vector for phishing attacks.

That's actually pretty awesome!

I don't think it counts if it can't actually edit text, i.e. open and save at minimum.

It’s a text editor. It can edit text just fine. If you need to do esoteric stuff like opening/saving you might as well install Visual Studio or something.

You can open and save. Just use the browser's save function, to save a local HTML file. (At least on my computer, this saves the text you put in, at least if you select the "complete" option when saving.) You can then recall that file just as easily.

Of course, it will only save as HTML and recall the same HTML file you saved in this way, and doesn't support plain text files. But, nevertheless, you can open and save.

You can even export as PDF and print

What a lifehack!

Neat! So simple.

that's quite cool actually!

All it needs is a browser!

BTW didn't work in android FF.

Works for me on android firefox

Thanks! I tried again, and it is working. It was so simple (and no cursor until select), I thought it was just a blank screen.

Does it run on DOS?

It is web scale!

thank you.

What about cat example.txt?

No browser needed. No GUI. Works offline.

Surely that's simpler?

it's also not an editor.

Would cat >> example.txt be one, however?

Yes, and it is my preferred method of editing `.gitignore` files:

cat >> .gitignore

*.pyc

^D

but you need the cat executable and CLI environment. Harder to do these days than double clicking on the browser icon.