Local-firstYour text never leaves your browser. No upload, no account, no server.
Most online text tools send whatever you paste to a server, run the work there, and send a result back. Your words sit in someone else’s logs, backups and databases, and you have to trust a privacy policy.
Local-first means the opposite: the whole tool is downloaded to your browser and runs on your own device. Nothing you type is transmitted anywhere — not to us, not to anyone. There is no server that could receive it, which is a stronger guarantee than a promise not to look.
Three consequences worth knowing:
Paste the original on the left and the changed version on the right, and every line is marked as added, removed or unchanged, numbered against both sides so you can find it in the real file. Switch on "show only changes" when the shared text is long and you only care about what moved. Comparing happens in your browser, which matters when the two versions are contract drafts, config files or anything else you would rather not upload to compare.
Because the comparison works line by line: a changed line is genuinely the old one gone and a new one in its place. Reading them as a pair is how every line-based diff, including git, presents an edit.
The left number is the line in the original and the right is the line in the changed version. They drift apart as lines are added or removed, which is exactly what makes them useful for finding the spot in the real file.
No. Windows CRLF and Unix LF endings are normalised before comparing, so a file that only changed line endings reads as identical rather than as every line rewritten.
Comparing is quadratic in the part that actually differs, so it stops at about 5,000 differing lines and says so rather than freezing the tab. Identical stretches at the start and end cost almost nothing, so a small change inside a large file is fine.