Draftpad

A local-first writing tool with live text metrics.

Most writing tools want an account before they will show you a cursor. Draftpad opens to a blank page and starts counting.

It tracks length, reading time and structure as you type, which makes it useful for the kind of writing that has to fit somewhere specific — a meta description, a caption, an abstract, a message you want to keep short.

Everything stays in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and there is nothing to sign into.

Open Draftpad

Screens

The Draftpad editor holding three paragraphs of draft text, with a drafts list on the left and a status bar reading 431 characters, 76 words, under a minute to read. — The editor. Counts update as you type, in the status bar rather than in your way.

Draftpad statistics panel showing words, characters and reading time, then structure counts for sentences, paragraphs and lines, then punctuation counts and a frequent-words list. — The full breakdown, for when the length is the point: structure, punctuation, and which words you have leaned on.

Draftpad in markdown mode: raw markdown source on the left with a formatting toolbar above it, and the rendered result on the right showing headings, bullet lists, inline code and a blockquote. — Markdown mode puts the source and the rendered page side by side, so you can see what you are writing without leaving what you wrote.

Built with · since 2025

Vanilla JS
CSS
Service Worker
jsPDF

Source

Every repository here is private. If you want to read or use the source of something, get in touch and say which project and what for.

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