Turn Your Browser into a Notepad With a Single Line of HTML5

It’s not the most useful tool since you can’t easily save your work, but this single line of HTML5 code certainly is clever.
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Finally, an editor so simple even Snoopy won't get distracted.Image: Webmonkey

If you ever need a quick scratchpad to just write, not save what you write, but just write, you can quickly turn your web browser into an ultra-basic notepad with a single line of HTML.

This clever trick comes from developer Jose Jesus Perez Aguinaga who says that “sometimes I just need to type garbage. Just to clear out my mind. Since I live in the browser, I just open a new tab and type”:

 data:text/html,

Thanks to the HTML5 contenteditable attribute and the modern browser’s ability to handle data URIs, your browser is now a notepad — just click to type.

Of course there’s no easy way to save your work, so while this is probably the most minimal editor you could hope for, it isn’t the most practical for actual work. Still a great trick though. Check out the comments on Aguinaga’s post and on this Hacker News thread for some enhancements to the basic idea (like what I used for the screenshot above) and a Chrome extension.