Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

It’s a great point. This uses the canvas element only because it’s rendering in the browser. But this is really a desktop application, so the canvas element doesn't come up as a concept outside of WASM. Your main contention seems to be that nobody other than web browser implementers can render and edit text, and thus we should be limited to the set of applications that can run on the DOM and leverage the web browser’s shaping and layout engines.

There are issues solved by the DOM for sure, but it requires shipping an entire web browser, and this product is a dedicated word processor. I’d rather face those issues head-on than defer to someone else’s implementation of such a core aspect. I know IME is broken, and Tritium’s really only able to address the needs of the happy path at the moment, but if can do that well, then there’s a business model to fund solving the edge cases to bring a real Word competitor to the desktop for lawyers.

The way this app is architected with Rust and egui, they can write code once and deploy a GPU accelerated app across all major operating systems and the browser, without having to ship a web browser with their application. That's a strong draw for developers. I think it's important to ship products like this, even if some users are frustrated, because that frustration will breed innovation. Since they said it's meant to be desktop only, I think what they're doing is fine, as the web is just an added bonus.

The approach they've taken can create frustration, but it can also be seamless for users and create joy. For instance, I got to try out their app without any setup on my part, and then I can download it and it works exactly the same on my Windows and my Mac machines, because it's the same codebase for all three platforms. That kind of story was the holy grail of UI tooling for many years, and I think we should keep going down that path to improve it, despite frustrations along the way.

You do get a lot for free with the DOM, but it's messy, works differently between different browser and you have to constantly fight it. With your own rendering engine it's more work but you have much more freedom and can get better performance.

This is explicitly called out in the canvas spec's best practices section with a laundry list of things you'd have to re-implement [1].

> Authors should avoid implementing text editing controls using the canvas element. Doing so has a large number of disadvantages:

> [...]

> This is a huge amount of work, and authors are most strongly encouraged to avoid doing any of it by instead using the input element, the textarea element, or the contenteditable attribute.

[1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/canvas.html#best-prac...

Wait, which 2 do you expect to become usable?

Great feedback; and I do agree. The HN link goes to the app itself because we're impatient, but there is an actual landing page most visitors hit.

I've gone back and forth on the UX idea, and while I do agree, it's important that Tritium selects for users that are going to be able to quickly adopt the newer concepts. Just simply presenting a "better Word" isn't really going to move the needle. It's really a shift in expectations. That said, I have recently backed off defaulting to dark mode to make it feel slightly more familiar.

There's a couple ways to skin it. In fields where people are happy with products, i think familiarity is good. In fields where people hate the products, you get to go in tabla rasa. In this case they take advantage of the form of the interface through multisearch et al. Instead of resembling legal software, I wonder if they should resemble a court or a briefcase?

I’m part of the team behind Zoho Contracts, focused on simplifying how businesses manage contracts across their lifecycle — from authoring, approvals, negotiation, and signing to renewals, amendments, compliance, with comprehensive analytics built in.

Our document editor is powered by Zoho Writer, offering all the capabilities of a word processor along with versioning, document assembly, and automation features. On top of this, we’ve built structured version control, clause-level change tracking, and workflow-integrated collaboration. This enables legal and business teams to work together seamlessly without relying on external editors or juggling redlined Word files over email.

Just sharing in case anyone else here is tackling similar problems or interested in the space.

Ah, a kindred spirit. I have been drafting part time for a local firm, and I feel like i’m on the cusp of a brilliant concept for pulling documents together, presenting case status to the lead lawyer … but I don’t have the time to coalesce my inklings into a tool.

I think we technical folk need to build technical tools for us to use while we explore the space and iterate on something that the normies will accept.

If you find anyone willing to invest money so a team can spend time on this, please let me know! :-)

Much (but not all) of what you are looking for exists in the reStructuredText [1] space. Sphinx [2] is an SSG focused on technical writing about software that you may find worth exploring.

Also, the scientific text community has been pushing MyST [3] which is an attempt to take some of the best ideas of reStructuredText and reapply them to Markdown-style syntax as a baseline. The MyST tools are a lot more recent and don't have the maturity just yet of Sphinx (including the larger ecosystem such as SaaS hosts like readthedocs).

[1] https://docutils.sourceforge.io/rst.html

[2] https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/index.html

[3] https://mystmd.org/

Word has offered redline merging for over several decades...

There's a reason it's still the standard in the legal industry.

The funny thing is that Word has tons of functionality that techies aren't aware of because they don't actually use it so they keep building products around features Word has had for years. And then they wonder why their startup failed to get any traction.

Copy and paste don't work on the web version, but they should work (including pasting formatting out into Office products) on desktop. Similarly for fonts. If you're using a font that contains Japanese characters it should render. It doesn't (yet) do a great job on falling back.

Try the download!

Thanks so much. Yes, the plan is to package libraries along with the product to allow for all kinds of external entities to be resolved.

Egui is great!

I pine for a DSL for legal documents, both because it’s tedious and tiresome to parse prose like this:

> Except for persons who manufacture, process, produce, or initially transfer for sale or distribution self-luminous products containing tritium, krypton-85, or promethium-147, and except as provided in paragraph (c) of this section, any person is exempt from the requirements for a license set forth in section 81 of the Act and from the regulations in parts 20 and 30 through 36 and 39 of this chapter to the extent that such person receives, possesses, uses, transfers, owns, or acquires tritium, krypton-85, or promethium-147 in self-luminous products manufactured, processed, produced, or initially transferred in accordance with a specific license issued pursuant to § 32.22 of this chapter, which license authorizes the initial transfer of the product for use under this section.

... and also because it is ambiguous / error-prone / subject to interpretation, especially when figuring out antecedents of pronouns, referents, and textual boundaries.

I tried four times to read the above by paragraph without reformatting it with some parentheses etc, but failed.

Can I trademark that slogan? :)

Agreed! I don't think lawyers would have accepted an Electron alternative to super fast Word. Rust gives the raw speed and safety necessary to compete.

It's my first Rust project, and I've found Rust to be amazing once you cross over the learning hurdle. The biggest issue was of course the borrow checker, but for a project like this where you aren't really iterating much on the design (as opposed to say a game dev), it lets you fly. It saves you from all the big mistakes and allows you to comfortably use threads and things. No idea how I would have made it without rust_analyzer, though.

Egui was simple to get going, while it has some downsides being an immediate mode UI, those are mostly overcome by the caching necessary for rendering documents, etc.

I created an account just to marvel at this very concept

The promise is what you see is what you get between Word and Tritium [desktop].

Transactional practices like RE, funds, capital markets, finance, derivatives, M&A are the target audience.

The roadmap includes a shared history but iManage integration is also in the works. So the experience will target google-docs like collab with something more familiar in terms of version control. That's on the roadmap though.

Can we chat offline? drew@tritium.legal

Reminds me of this old HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4353389

Trivial in LaTeX, does word not do that?

Great idea! Definitely coming.

When I went back to college to finish my degree, some of my classes used online textbooks from a couple different systems. Most had a simple link to a glossary for key terms, but some took it a bit farther and had a nice pop-over widget. The nice ones also had the ability for you to highlight and annotate passages for your own notes. It's less fun though, if you're like me and have a hard time reading long-form content on a laptop or phone. I ended up getting one of those eink Android tablets to make it easier for me to get through the reading.

Shame is that monetization around them is even more exploitative than normal textbooks. You don't own them, so you can't keep or resell them once you're done, and you typically lose access to it about a week after the class ends. Many courses also issue assignments and grades through the e-textbook, so you're forced to buy it at a price they decide. Fortunately work reimbursed mine.

Yes! From scratch. It started with a docx library but had to be re-implemented from the beginning because that library dropped data that wasn't implemented. Tritium's docx implementation is more permissive such that it can gracefully failover to just pure XML if it can't parse an element via the AST.

Noted, and to be fixed. Thank you

That's very kind -- let's hope the legal profession feels the same way. It's certainly inspired by VS code. It's using egui (https://github.com/emilk/egui) under the hood. Big hats off to Emil Ernerfeldt and the team at rerun (https://app.rerun.io/) for the incredible work on a great immediate mode GUI library.

> My understanding working with law firms was that they are pretty bought-in to the Microsoft Office ecosystem, how well does Tritium integrate?

Absolutely. Overbought. They're owned by Microsoft. Go to a legal tech conference and there are thousands of vendors and not a single MSFT representative. All they want to do is push more Azureware on the deep pockets of profitable firms.

> Is the docx format fully supported?

It will be. There are certainly edge case features that don't render correctly yet, but those will come. The 80% that we care about should work. No data will be dropped, as mentioned elsewhere it will just look bad and gracefully degrade behind the scenes to a safe representation that ensures the data isn't lost.

> Can one person use Tritium without affecting others?

Yes, it's totally private and secure. Using Tritium doesn't require any cloud access or anything like that (other than to phone home with the auto-update or your LLM integration). I'm going to link the history to a separate hidden directory in the filesystem a la .git in the future which will allow some basic multi-editor features.

> Other than tabs, what does Tritium offer that two Word panes and a file browser pane tiled on screen can't cover?

Great question! It does the things lawyers care about: help them pick out symbols (defined terms, specifically) and run diffs (redlines) cheap and quick. It also renders PDFs (using pdfium).

> I am interested in developing software in this space, so these are earnest questions and not criticism.

Drop a line to the email in my bio. I'd love to chat offline.

It probably wouldn't make sense to show lawyers what we do, either, but there's a kernel of truth there: the product needs some development on the onboarding.

Thanks so much for the idea. You may already know this, but fonts are actually little pieces of software subject to their own licensing terms. For that reason, Tritium (like most word processors, I believe) relies on the system fonts available for rendering. Those are already owned by the user. I'll reach out to Matthew and see if there's any possibility for collaboration.

Thanks so much. It does have this banner: "Some features are unavailable in Web Preview. <link>Download the Desktop version</link> for full speed and functionality." which is intended to capture that exact issue.

I'd love to coordinate a demo for you personally if you can spare the time. I'm at drew@tritium.legal or you could drop your info here: https://tritium.legal/demo. I'm familiar with working with and onboarding to regulated IT departments.

[NOTE: some of the speed issues are coming from the pipes clogging up due to the traffic. There's no CDN here unfortunately.]

Yes, although that is not the target audience and we'll try to avoid spending time generalizing the product too much for laypeople to remain laser focused on the target.

Because the add-ins are crap and they know it. But you're right: the risk here is purely technical.

Noted, and will be done. Thank you for the feedback. Were you on mobile or desktop?

Yes, they are not incentivized to adopt new technology in their current state. The senior partners don't want to wait around for the eventuality of charging more per hour. That's why Tritium is marked to in-house lawyers for now.

I talked a little about this back in September: https://www.legalinnovators.co.uk/post/legal-innovators-uk-t...

Actually I’m based in the UK and can say corporate law practice is nearly identical. Thanks for sharing!

Ah yes, that is a bug where the layout engine can't fit it correctly and gets stuck in a loop. It maxes out rather than overflows, but the same effect. It's being worked on, and sorry for the inconvenience.

and then populating document to cover all the aspects of selected law

I'm fairly certain lawyers exist specifically because this is infeasible.

Apologies if that's the case. It's just a WASM application intended to demo the real desktop application. No nefarious purpose there, but perhaps the limitations of the "preview". Try the desktop version!

Probably something like: "

[Person] - hope you're well! I wanted to put Tritium on your radar. It's a word processor jacked on steroids built just for transactional lawyers.

From built-in defined term annotation to multi-document search/replace to redlining and much, much more, it will help your team work faster and more effectively on existing Word documents and PDFs. You'll even pick up errors from outside counsel.

Tritium runs on Windows, MacOS and even Linux for your most tech savvy lawyers.

Please let me know if that might be good for your legal team, and I'd love to demo it for you."

It actually does on the desktop versions. The "web preview" doesn't have any access to the browser's fonts, so it's limited to an open-source embedded font. Check out the downloads!

Awesome bug report! Thank you. Let me check into it. Would be even better to understand if you could replicate it on the Desktop application.

It's not for everybody, but it's already being used by lawyers, and I'm one myself and want it. Appreciate it's not for you!

The incredible irony of a typo in legal documentation related to a legal drafting application is not lost on me. Thanks very much for the positive words and the correction!

Not yet, and I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but that's exactly the of question its users should be asking :)

Apologies for that. I thing the pipe is getting hugged a bit here. Unfortunately it's a bit lean so no GCP outages to blame it on!

That's a fair take at surface level, but building a cross-platform application does allow for a broader class of contributors who can also dogfood the product.

I'll have to do another write-up about it sometime, but a lot of Tritium's automated tests are written in docx files. So building for Linux as an afterthought allows an employee to develop from their preferred platform (if it's Linux) while still getting the full experience. Also there is something quite informing about discovering differences between platforms that help you to better understand the capabilities of each.

I also do believe one day we'll see, e.g., crypto startups' lawyers using Linux. And they'll be happy Tritium customers :)