Offline writing

Writing that doesn’t stop when the connection does.

Last updated 24 August 2026

Minimal Writer is an offline-first writing app. Every change is saved to the device you’re writing on first, then synced when a connection is available.

That order is the whole design, and it is worth stating plainly because most writing tools that live in a browser assume the opposite one. Here the network is not where the writing lives while you are typing. It is what moves the writing between your own machines afterwards.

Local first. Cloud second.

A keystroke goes into your browser’s own storage on the machine in front of you. That write is the one the app waits for; it is also the one it reads back from, so nothing you can see on screen is waiting on a server somewhere to confirm it. The push to the cloud happens after, on its own time, and a push that cannot go through does not reach back and undo anything.

The practical version: the app does not have two modes. There is no offline mode to switch into and no online mode you are dropped out of, because the writing was never going anywhere else to begin with. The footer simply says which of the two copies has your latest words — saved here, or saved in both places — and that line is the same line whether you are on fibre or in a basement.

Document history works the same way round. The snapshots the app takes as you write are taken on the device, so the version you want back from an hour ago is there to open whether or not the connection has been anywhere near you since.

What happens when the connection disappears

Nothing, which is the point. A train goes into a tunnel, a café’s Wi-Fi asks you to log in again, a plane leaves the gate, a router at home stops answering. The paragraph you are in the middle of carries on exactly as it was: the same page, the same focus mode, the same undo history, and the words continuing to be saved as you type them.

You can also open the app in the first place. Once it has run on a device it is cached there, so the address opens to your library with no connection at all — and if you have installed it, the icon on your dock or home screen behaves the same way. What you cannot do offline is sign in for the first time on a new machine, or download a spellcheck dictionary in a language you have not used on that device yet. Those need the network once; the writing does not.

What happens when you come back online

The queue drains by itself. Every change that could not be pushed while you were away is held on the device in the order it happened, and the app sends it the moment the connection returns — not when you remember to press something, and not only if you have kept the tab open. Close the browser mid-flight and the queue is still there when you open it at the other end.

If a push fails for some other reason the row stays queued rather than being dropped, and the next attempt tries again. The only thing you have to do with any of it is notice the footer change, and most people don’t.

When two devices changed the same document

This is the case that offline-first has to get right, because it is the one where a wrong answer costs somebody a morning. You write two thousand words on a laptop with no signal. Meanwhile the same chapter is edited on a desktop that does have one. Now there are two versions of the truth and one of them is about to arrive.

Minimal Writer keeps both. Each push carries the version the device last saw, so the app can tell the difference between a change that follows on and a change that collided. When it collided, the device you are typing on keeps the document you are typing in — your caret does not move and your text is not merged into by something you cannot see — and the other version arrives beside it as a second document, named so you can tell which is which. You decide what to keep by reading them.

That is deliberately not the clever answer. A tool that merged the two automatically would be right most of the time and quietly wrong occasionally, and quietly wrong is the worst thing that can happen to a draft. Two documents and a decision is the honest version. The app will also tell you, while you are writing, when a document is open in more than one place — the warning is worth more before the divergence than after it.

Offline does not have to mean locked in

Keeping your writing on your own device is only half of it. The other half is whether you can get it out, and in what shape. Everything here is written in Markdown, in both directions — you can type the plain syntax or work in the visual view where the same shortcuts still apply — and it downloads as a .md file on any plan, including one that has ended.

So the local copy is not a hostage held in a format only this app can read. It is text, in a notation that will still open in whatever people are writing in a decade from now. Offline-first and open formats are the same promise made twice: the words are yours, wherever they happen to be sitting.

Who offline-first writing is useful for

It matters most to people whose writing time is not the same as their connected time. A novelist drafting a chapter on a train gets the same page in a tunnel as on the platform. A student moving between a library, a lecture hall and a kitchen table does not have to think about which of those has working Wi-Fi. And anyone writing somewhere the network is simply unreliable — a rented flat, a rural cottage, a conference centre with four hundred other laptops on it — gets to treat the connection as somebody else’s problem.

The rest of us need it about four times a year, for twenty minutes, at exactly the moment the work is going well. That is reason enough to build it this way round.