IdeaScribe is a fast, block-based note editor: rich text, embedded media, nested pages, page icons and cover images, a sidebar you can navigate your whole workspace from, and a trash you can actually restore things out of. Everything syncs in real time, so a page you're editing updates instantly wherever else it's open.
I built it as a weekend project right after picking up full-stack development and React properly for the first time. I'd just learned enough to be dangerous and wanted a real project to put it all into practice on, something with enough moving parts (a rich editor, real-time data, file storage, page hierarchies) to actually stress-test what I'd just learned, rather than another to-do list app.
Key Features
- Full rich-text editing. Powered by BlockNote, so formatting, block types, and the general feel of writing are handled by a proper editor rather than a bare textarea.
- Media support. Images, video, and other file embeds drop straight into a page alongside your text.
- Nested pages. Pages can live inside other pages, so a workspace can grow into an actual hierarchy instead of one long flat list.
- Icons and cover images. Every page can carry its own icon and cover image for quick visual recognition in the sidebar.
- A real sidebar. Navigate the whole page tree, expand and collapse nested pages, and jump between documents without losing your place.
- Trash and restore. Deleted pages go to a trash you can recover from, rather than disappearing the moment you hit delete.
- Public sharing. Publish a page so it's viewable outside your own workspace.
- Dark mode, because no editor is complete without one.
Under the Hood
- Next.js handles the app itself: routing, rendering, and the overall page structure.
- BlockNote provides the actual block-based rich-text editing experience, formatting, block types, and the underlying document model.
- Convex does most of the heavy lifting behind the scenes: it's the database, the real-time sync layer, and the file storage all at once, which is what makes edits show up instantly across sessions without any manual socket or polling logic.
- Tailwind CSS handles styling throughout.
Why It's Not Fancier Than It Needs to Be
There's no dramatic technical war story here, and that's honestly fine. It was a weekend build meant to turn brand-new full-stack and React knowledge into something real and working, not a production system with edge cases to fight through. The one deliberate gap is full-text search across pages; everything else on the feature list made it in.