Console

What is Stashpad and why did you build it?

Stashpad is a notepad. I’m a software engineer, and I set out to create tools to help other developers like me to work better and enjoy their work. I started with some ideas, little things I thought could be better, but when I really dug into it and started to sit next to other developers as they were working, what I saw is that there are a couple of apps that developers pretty much always have up on their screen. They have their code editor, a browser, Slack, and then there's a notepad. All of the other tools except the notepad have gotten a ton of investment, but the notepad is often just a plain text file – it's super bare bones. When I saw that, I realized, "Oh, that's actually how I manage all my work and process my thoughts related to work. It's so important and it hasn't been thought about in this way." And so, we set out to reimagine the notepad for developers like us.

Stashpad is better than just a text editor in two ways. The first is that it has all the features that developers would expect of any tool. It has markdown support, dark theme or light theme. You can customize any of the key bindings, and it's very keyboard centric. It has code block support with lots of different languages, code syntax highlighting, all those things that you expect as a developer.

And then, to me, where it gets even more interesting is that, as a professional software developer you often have to jump around different tasks. There’s deep-focus work, but also a lot of context switching. That's just a necessary evil. Stashpad is specifically designed to let you jump across those different threads and jot things down, compartmentalized, such that you never get too disorganized and always feel pretty good about where you're at.