I Hit 2.1 Million Downloads.
Then I Built an Editor That Does “Nothing.”
It's 1 a.m. and I just need to hand a draft to someone who doesn't use Markdown.
Three plugins. Three restarts. The first one broke the layout. The second one fought with the first. The third fixed the images and killed the footnotes.
Forty minutes in, I stopped. What the hell am I doing?
I just wanted to hand off my words.
That's when it hit me: I wasn't maintaining notes. I was maintaining a system.
I'm cuman, a core member of the PKMer community.
I help maintain the Blue Topaz theme. Blue Topaz Example has 2.6K stars on GitHub. My Editing Toolbar plugin has 2.1 million downloads and has sat in the top 20 for years. There's Floating TOC too. Over ten thousand articles in the PKMer knowledge base, all open source.
I'm probably the last person who should be talking trash about this ecosystem.
But I've been in it long enough to know exactly where the ceiling is.
We spent ten years turning Markdown into something you have to configure.
Themes, plugins, hotkeys, CSS snippets, workspace layouts. Two people open the same folder and see two different apps. Want a feature? First you need to know what it's called, which plugin ships it, whether that plugin is still maintained, and whether the last update broke it.
Then AI showed up and made it weirder. The barrier to writing code collapsed. Plugins sprouted like weeds. And the cost of choosing exploded right along with them. You don't lack tools anymore. What you lack is not having to choose.
And the format itself is backwards. Source is one thing, reading is another. The same paragraph looks different in two panes. We call that “professional.” Everyone else just sees a seam.
But most of us just want to jot something down.
Capture what we learned. Sort out what we think. Finish a draft we have to hand in. We didn't come here to fiddle with tools.
So a lot of people picked Typora. Simple. What you see is what you get.
But the moment your notes pile up, Typora can't keep up. It doesn't know what [[wiki links]] are. Ask it who links back to a note and you get nothing. So you end up running two apps: Typora to write, Obsidian to store. Some people even open VS Code to manage Markdown. A code editor, moonlighting as a note librarian.
The tools got heavier and heavier, until you were the one serving them.
I've always thought notes should feel like a book.
Same words, different publisher, different layout, and the whole thing reads wrong. Your thoughts go sideways with it. You want that one familiar book: paper gone slightly yellow, that faint smell, and your own words the moment you open it.
Not a book that opens by asking: which theme today? Which plugin? Who's handling the export?
So I made Morz.
Simplicity in ink. Freedom in text.
It's not “another Markdown editor.” It's an attempt to put back what got scattered over the years:
Open it and you're already in the layout
No edit pane and preview pane. What you see is the final thing, and the source lines match it exactly.
Tables do math
Sum, average, fill a series. No round trip to Excel.
Exports that pass muster
PDFs with page numbers, page numbers in the table of contents, bookmarks down the side. Word files with a navigation outline. No scrolling through ten thousand plugins to pick one.
The files are still yours
Plain .md. No import, no database, no upload, no account.
Light, and everywhere
Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, the browser. Same file, opens on any of them.
The usual suspects are built in
Wiki links, tags, outline, search, themes, typewriter mode, focus mode. Works out of the box. Nothing to install.
And if you want to go further, build it yourself
Get AI to write you a plugin. The process is knowledge too.
I'm not against plugins. I'm against having to learn an entire ecosystem for a need that should have been simple.
The real question
Building Morz, I kept asking: what feature is missing? Should I ship everything at once? How should the membership work? Where does Morz beat Obsidian, Typora, Mubu?
Concrete questions. All branches of the same one.
The real question: who can't live without Morz?
Not "more features." Why would someone open it at a specific moment instead of sticking with the tool already on their machine? So I pushed harder:
- 01If I could keep only three features, which three?
- 02Which kind of user am I willing to disappoint?
- 03At what exact moment does someone say, "this is the one"?
If I can't answer those, every feature just makes the product blurrier. Scope, pricing, plugin priorities—all of it starts to drift.
My answer right now is narrow: a local writing tool that opens and works, for people who just want to finish the words and keep the files. Images, tables, export, wiki links, queries—all of it serves that answer. None of it is there to make the feature list longer.
And one layer deeper: do I want a product that pays the bills, or a piece of work I'm proud of? I don't have the final answer. But for now, I'd rather make something I want to open every day.
I don't expect Morz to be the most powerful.
I expect one afternoon you'll finish a paragraph, look up, and blank for a second—
what editor was I just using?
When you can't remember,
it worked.
Writing shouldn't be this hard.