{"by":"FailMore","descendants":22,"id":47777633,"kids":[47807630,47795933,47791589,47790018,47790288,47814913,47805038,47778009,47793108,47814454],"score":41,"text":"Hi HN, I’d like to introduce you to SmallDocs (https://sdocs.dev). SDocs is a CLI + webapp to instantly and 100% privately elegantly preview and share markdown files. (Code: https://github.com/espressoplease/SDocs)

The more we work with command line based agents the more `.md` files are part of our daily lives. Their output is great for agents to produce, but a little bit frustrating for humans: Markdown files are slightly annoying to read/preview and fiddly to share/receive. SDocs was built to resolve these pain points.

If you `sdoc path/to/file.md` (after `npm i -g sdocs-dev`) it instantly opens in the browser for you to preview (with our hopefully-nice-to-look-at default styling) and you can immediately share the url.

The `.md` files our agents produce contain some of the most sensitive information we have (about codebases, unresolved bugs, production logs, etc.). For this reason 100% privacy is an essential component of SDocs.

To achieve this SDoc urls contain your markdown document's content in compressed base64 in the url fragment (the bit after the `#`):

https://sdocs.dev/#md=GzcFAMT...(this is the contents of your document)...

The cool thing about the url fragment is that it is never sent to the server (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F...: "The fragment is not sent to the server when the URI is requested; it is processed by the client").

The sdocs.dev webapp is purely a client side decoding and rendering engine for the content stored in the url fragment. This means the contents of your document stays with you and those you choose to share it with, the SDocs server doesn't access it. (Feel free to inspect/get your agent to inspect our code to confirm this!)

Because `.md` files might play a big role in the future of work, SDocs wants to push the boundaries of styling and rendering interesting content in markdown files. There is much more to do, but to start with you can add complex styling and render charts visually. The SDocs root (which renders `sdoc.md` with our default styles) has pictures and links to some adventurous examples. `sdoc schema` and `sdoc charts` provides detailed information for you or your agent about how how make the most of SDocs formatting.

If you share a SDocs URL, your styles travel with it because they are added as YAML Front Matter - https://jekyllrb.com/docs/front-matter/ - to the markdown file. E.g.:

   ---\n\n   styles:\n\n     fontFamily: Lora\n\n     baseFontSize: 17\n\n     ...\n\n   ---\n

\nAt work, we've been putting this project to the test. My team and I have found SDocs to be particularly useful for sharing agent debugging reports and getting easily copyable content out of Claude (e.g. a series of bash commands that need to be ran).

To encourage our agents to use SDocs we add a few lines about them in our root "agent files" (e.g. ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md or ~/.codex/AGENTS.md). When you use the cli for the first time there is an optional setup phase to do this for you.

I'm of course very interested in feedback and open to pull requests if you want to add features to SDocs.

Thank you for taking a look!","time":1776252552,"title":"Show HN: SmallDocs - Markdown without the frustrations","type":"story"}