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We Put a Pet Cat in Our Markdown Editor

Robert James Gabriel
4 min
We Put a Pet Cat in Our Markdown Editor (and That's Just the Start)
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We Put a Pet Cat in Our Markdown Editor (and That's Just the Start)

We set out to build a clean, simple markdown editor. No accounts. No tracking. Just write, preview, done. And honestly, that part works really well. Split-pane editing, GitHub Flavored Markdown, syntax highlighting, drag and drop, 8 themes, auto-save, the works.

But then we kept going.


Meet the Chaos Zone

Tucked away in the settings panel, there's a section we've been calling the Chaos Zone. It's a collection of toggleable features that have absolutely no business being in a markdown editor. We built them anyway.

Here's what's in there now.


A pixel cat lives in your editor

Toggle on Pet Cat mode and a little pixel cat appears at the bottom of your screen. It's not a static image. It's a full sprite-animated cat with 38 different animations and its own energy-based AI.

It walks around. It sits down when it's tired. It sleeps and dreams when its energy is low. It eats, scratches, digs, and occasionally does zoomies across the screen for no reason.

Click on it and it reacts. Sometimes it jumps. Sometimes it hisses. Sometimes it runs off-screen and then slowly creeps back with a little speech bubble that says "...back" or "peeks".

It also has a drama mode where it fakes its own death, flips upside down, and then gets back up like nothing happened. We're pretty proud of that one.


Matrix rain, because why not

Turn on Matrix Rain and green katakana characters start cascading down your editor background. It's subtle enough that you can still write, but cool enough that you'll leave it on. Every column falls at its own speed. It uses the same character set as the film: katakana plus hex digits.


Vaporwave mode

This one switches your theme to synthwave, adds CRT scanlines over the whole editor, and slowly rotates the hue of everything on screen. It's like writing markdown inside a VHS tape from 1987. A E S T H E T I C.


Combo counter

Start typing and a combo counter appears at the top of your screen. Keep going without pausing and the label escalates: COMBO, GREAT, AMAZING, INCREDIBLE, UNSTOPPABLE, GODLIKE, BEYOND GODLIKE, LEGENDARY. Stop typing for more than a second and a half and you lose your streak. It's surprisingly motivating.


Confetti, emoji rain, and a rage quit detector

Every keystroke can launch confetti. Emoji rain drops random emoji from the top of the screen as you type. And if you select a bunch of text and delete it all at once, the rage quit detector kicks in with a red flash, screen shake, and sad confetti.


What we fixed along the way

This update wasn't just about adding fun stuff. We also cleaned up a bunch of things under the hood.

The cat used to get stuck in corners and never come back. Fixed. Clicking the cat used to do nothing because its internal state machine was always busy. Fixed. The matrix rain toggle wasn't actually wired up to the right method, so it would stay on no matter what. Fixed. We also removed a couple of features that weren't working well enough, specifically Word Explosions and a rich text writing mode, to keep things focused.


8 themes to match your mood

The editor ships with 8 themes: Night, Dracula, Coffee, Sunset, Dim, Nord, Cupcake, and Synthwave. Switch between them instantly from the settings. Dark, light, warm, cool, whatever you're feeling.


Privacy first, always

This is the part that doesn't change. The Markdown Editor collects zero data. No analytics. No tracking. No accounts. Everything runs locally in your browser or on your device. We never see your content. That's not a feature we added. It's how the whole thing is built.


Where to get it

The browser extensions are free on all platforms.

The Mac and iPad app is available on the App Store.

No accounts needed. No subscriptions. Just install and start writing. Or install and pet the cat. We won't judge.