Show HN: I made a website to write online math as fast as paper
maxtobiasen Saturday, February 28, 2026I want to preface this by saying I'm extremely new to webdev, and this is my first finished product. Any feedback is greatly appreciated!
Every digital math tool, at least for me, has been significantly worse than just pen and paper. LaTeX is far too slow, and most WYSIWYG editors are lacking features.
Scratchpad is my solution to this. You type shortcuts, and they render in real time inline using MathQuill. Stuff that I've added:
- Greek letters, lower and uppercase - Matrices (super clunky in every other editor I've tried!) - Accents like vector arrows and derivative dots - Tons of other useful symbols (set notation, gradients, plusminus, partial derivatives)
In my experience using it while in development, it's been substantially faster than pen and paper. There's a bit of a learning curve with the shortcuts, but I tried to make it as intuitive as possible.
The whole thing is on one index.html file, just open it and start writing. I would really appreciate any notes, especially from anyone who has experience with digital math notes. Thanks!