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:
Three jobs in one place. Encoding a query value escapes everything a parameter could break on, including & = ? and #. Encoding a whole URL leaves the structural characters intact so the address still works. Decoding turns percent escapes back into readable text, which is how you make sense of a long tracking link. Malformed escapes are reported rather than thrown, so a half-copied URL tells you what is wrong.
Use the query value mode for anything you are putting after a = in a URL, since it escapes the separators. Use the whole URL mode when you have a complete address containing spaces or accents and want to keep its slashes and question mark working.
Percent-encoding always produces %20. The plus form comes from HTML form submission, which uses a slightly different scheme. Decoding here follows the percent rules, so a literal plus stays a plus.
Every % in an encoded URL must be followed by two hexadecimal digits. If a link was truncated or partially decoded already, one of them is incomplete, and decoding cannot guess what was intended.