In 1945, Vannevar Bush published “As We May Think” in The Atlantic. He described a machine called the memex — a desk with screens, levers, and microfilm that would let a researcher browse, annotate, and link documents. Not just read them. Edit them. Add trails of association between ideas. Build new knowledge from existing knowledge.
Bush never built it. But he described the editing experience with remarkable precision: “He can add marginal notes and comments…and it could be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme…just as though he had the physical page before him.”
A stylus. Marginal notes. As though the physical page were before him. In 1945, before transistors, before screens, before the internet, Bush imagined WYSIWYG editing. Not the technology — the experience. The feeling of annotating a document as naturally as writing in the margin of a book.
Twenty years later, Douglas Engelbart built something closer. The 1968 “Mother of All Demos” showed collaborative editing, hyperlinks, version control, and a mouse — all in one session. Engelbart’s system let multiple people edit the same document simultaneously. In 1968.
Then something strange happened. The technology got better and the editing got worse.
Word processors replaced typewriters. Desktop publishing replaced paste-up. HTML replaced print. And at every transition, the editor — the tool that stands between the person with an idea and the place the idea lives — got more powerful and less invisible. More features. More toolbars. More modes and options and configuration panels standing between “I want to write this” and “it is written.”
Markdown was the correction. Gruber in 2004, saying: the editor should disappear. The formatting should be the writing. No toolbar. No modes. Just text that looks like what it means. A heading is a line with a hash. A list is lines with dashes. Bold is asterisks. The syntax is the interface.
But markdown was a correction for developers. For people who think in plain text. For someone who has never seen a terminal, ## Section Title is not obvious. It is code. The editor didn’t disappear — it shapeshifted into syntax that only programmers can see through.
Bush’s memex. Engelbart’s demo. Gruber’s markdown. Three visions of the same thing: editing that feels like the document, not the tool. Each one got closer to the experience and further from the audience. Bush imagined it for researchers. Engelbart built it for engineers. Gruber wrote it for developers.
Nobody built it for the person who just wants to fix a typo on their company’s website.
That is what gitpress is.
Not a new editor. Not a new format. Not a new protocol. A disappearance. The editor that gets out of the way so completely that a marketer can fix a heading, a designer can update copy, and a PM can add a paragraph — without learning git, without understanding frontmatter, without asking a developer for permission.
Bush wanted the memex to feel like a physical page. Seventy-one years later, we are still trying to make digital editing feel as natural as writing in a margin. The technology exists. The formats exist. The version control exists. The only thing missing is the courage to hide all of it.
Simple solutions with elegant user control. That is the hallmark. That is gitpress. The editor that disappears.