I built a writing app instead of writing an article

Letters happened by accident. I had one article to write and publish, but I was procrastinating hard enough to decide that I first needed a nicer place to write it.

None of the 357+ writing apps I had seen felt right. I wanted something super simple: a private page that worked only on my computer, saved itself in the browser, and let me copy the finished text into wherever it needed to be published.

The accidental first hour

I gave myself one hour to make a quick local prototype. The first version came from GPT-5.6 Terra in one go. It had an editor, I could write in it, and it automatically saved my words in my browser.

Nice. Now I can write that article. Or not.

The original plan

Then I started choosing colours

The white default was not it, so I asked for some better colour combinations: a background, readable text, and an accent that made the page feel worth opening. Terra delivered seven beautiful theme directions, and I was hooked.

• Nine ready-made themes, each with its own type and colour combination.
• Seven typefaces, backdrops, and a random colour shuffle for finding a mood.
• One rule: when the page feels right, stop setting it up and write.

The detour became the work

The first commit landed on Sunday, August 30, 2026 at 11:24 PM CEST. From there, the one-hour prototype kept earning one more hour: local autosave became a library and timeline; a plain editor became a proper rich-text page; colours became themes, type, backdrops, and the slightly dangerous random colour button.

By launch, the project has 101 commits, 98 source and public files, and 12,580 tracked lines. The useful parts made it in: headings, lists, checklists, quotes, images, embeds, tables, code blocks, clean text and Markdown copies, plus local backups that you can export, import, replace, or restore.

What Letters is, today

Letters is still deliberately small. There is no account to create and no save button to manage. You open a page, write, and your work is saved locally in this browser. If it matters, export a backup now and then.

It is a writing space for getting words out, then copying them into the app where they need to live. That is the whole promise.

Friday, September 4, 2026 — 10:02 PM CEST

It is Friday, and I need to stop refining this and launch it to see whether anyone else likes it. So this is it: Letters launches today. Choose a theme, start an article, and write one honest sentence.