outl blog

A deep engineering update on outl: the elected endpoint lease that lets a headless daemon hold P2P sync without starving the GUI, a pairing handshake where anyone who knew your address could take the slot, page history read straight out of an append-only…

A friend asked how I structure my notes in outl.

Adding backlinks made outl slow to open and edit on a big workspace: 2800 pages, 211k ops, and every Esc stuttered.

I imported four years of notes out of another app in one shot, sixty-odd thousand blocks and a couple hundred thousand operations, and the volume dragged a pile of latent move-op and p2p-sync bugs into daylight in a single week.

outl syncs your notes device to device with no server in the middle.

I wanted a green dot that said peer-to-peer was alive.

Last month I gave every page root a deterministic id derived from its slug, so two devices that create the same day's journal land on the same node and merge instead of splitting.

The journal on my phone flickered between two versions of the same day.

Importing 80,000 blocks killed outl on the iPhone: iOS jetsam shot the app on open because every block kept a live Yrs CRDT document resident for the whole session.

outl dropped iCloud for iroh.

TUI, native desktop, and an iOS app on TestFlight — all reading the same workspace folder.

outl 0.1.0 ships today: a local-first markdown outliner, vim-style TUI, executable code blocks in five languages, and the tree-CRDT algorithm that makes offline sync provably correct.