--- title: "Where is HackMD heading to?" tags: en, team productivity description: What has the HackMD team been working on and where this product is heading to? image: https://hackmd.io/_uploads/ByDIMuGas.png author: elek summary: | "The HackMD team has been working on a new design to reduce context switching and better organization for multiple notes." date: "2023-02-09" --- <style> .hmd-primer-logo { background-image: url(https://hackmd.io/_uploads/HkrpIo3MK.png); background-size: cover; width: 1em; height: 1em; min-height: 18px; display: inline-block; } figcaption { text-align: center; } </style> # Where are we now? You may have been aware that HackMD will get a new look since its announcement last November and wondering about its progress. Since then, the HackMD team has been interviewing users and meeting various challenges to bring you a fresh experience while upholding the best of HackMD. When something is changed in the looking of an app, there are often much more alterations than the eyes meet. For example, the title and the tags of the note will get their own independent places on the screen. Behind this, we are working on separating the title and the tags from the body of the note and, in turn, where the app gets these metadatum. Yes, this means that you are going to add/edit/remove tags in a dedicated window, not in the note. Learning there are breaking changes in the app you use every day, you must be worried. Yet, you have good reasons to rest assured and trust us as you have always. First of all, we promise that we have pondered every change before implementing them. They are motivated by user feedback and deliberated by our team. If you haven't got your voice heard, please don't hesitate to [do so](mailto:support@hackmd.io). To get you onboard the changes more swiftly, we are shipping them first through "Feature preview," which you may toggle on to opt-in from Settings → Feature preview. There is a "Help and feedback" button at the lower-right corner. Click it and bombard us with questions and any other feedback. Your voice has a say. Building HackMD is an ever-going conversation between you and the team behind it. We will only ship the new look only when the conversation is converged and to which we are confident that we've done everything possible to deal with the diverged perspectives. # Where are we heading to? With HackMD, you can take notes, draft documentation, and publish them in no time, building a community by regularly publishing meeting minutes and RFCs. In the long run, people trust those who keep publishing. That being said, we fully get that there is still much to amend to deliver a delightful experience to HackMD users. With the new design comes various changes we will only name two of the most requested ones below. **Spelling and grammar checking:** You work in the editor of HackMD, like, daily, but its lacking spelling and grammar checking has been a stark pain point. The good news is that we are upgrading our editor. Soon it will work with Grammarly and other browser extensions, which can boost the confidence in the correctness of the content when publishing notes. As a knowledge base, you must be empowered to get what may be the clues when you'd like to find them. Most of the time, this is done by full-text search and sorting the notes into categories. You have tags for the latter task, which, unfortunately, is yet satisfying enough. **Do it in batch:** With the new interface, you can add/edit/remove tags for multiple notes. Trash them or transfer them to another workspace. On the other hand, we will provide our equivalent to folders to help you tidy up your workspace. In doing so, operating with multiple notes would be a big plus. ## Your community of trust In an era of decentralization and privacy, where information competes for your attention, everyday life is like a guerrilla war, saving the fire and the smoke, and the steep challenge is to build your own brand and hold up people's trust. At HackMD, we believe constant publishing worthy knowledge to the world is fundamental to your branding. It's an essential way to show everyone who cares that you care. So, we are building HackMD to help you in this enterprise. And we will do this in three stages. First, you should have an editor that you can write as unburdened and undisturbed as possible. Secondly, you should get a more flexible, yet more structured, commenting capability to converse with others based on your note. There are more interactions to build in this regard. Thirdly, you should be able to publish with the least worry and with a designed reading experience for your readers. If you are also interested in building your own community based on publishing documentation, we need to hear your voice. Please [get in touch](https://cal.com/hackmd-elek/ux-interview).