The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2022
Bike rebuilds the Mac outliner around fluid motion and Moby Dick-size documents
Jesse Grosjean's Bike brings smoothly animated editing and instant opening of huge outlines to the Mac — 513 HN points.
Hog Bay Software
What it had to solve
Jesse Grosjean, the single developer behind Hog Bay Software's Bike, watched the outliner category fill with feature-rich web apps. His answer to why another outliner was to rebuild the basics from scratch for the Mac: an app fast enough for projects that 'break other outliners', with text that moves smoothly on screen.
How it works
Outlining is an old, crowded category, and by 2022 most new entrants were web apps racing on features. Jesse Grosjean, the single developer behind Hog Bay Software's Bike, chose the opposite direction: build the basics from scratch as a native Mac app and compete on how the tool feels.
Bike's two promises are visible immediately. Text 'slides into place' as you type — animations that cancel the moment you type again — and huge documents open instantly: Moby Dick is the standing test file, and Grosjean said every sync or CRDT solution he tried 'blew up' on files that size. The app stays local, uses little memory and battery, and adds row types, keyboard-first focus-heading navigation and distraction-free modes on top of that core.
The third bet is the file format. A .bike document is plain HTML that opens in any web browser, and Bike also reads and writes .opml and .txt, so an outline is never trapped in the app. Deep links into the outline survive renaming or moving the file, scripts and Shortcuts automate it, and the whole design integrates with existing Mac workflows rather than replacing them.
The Show HN on 2022-05-17 drew 513 points and 236 comments. Grosjean used the thread to translate marketing words into engineering answers: fluidity is animation, native means fewer resources, and open files mean the outline outlives the app. Longtime outliner users pressed him on how Bike differs from TaskPaper, Workflowy and Logseq, and he answered point by point.
Why it lands
- Making animation a visible feature gave a mature category a reason to switch: Bike does not claim to be a little better, it moves differently.
- Using Moby Dick as the standing test file turned a performance promise into a benchmark anyone could reproduce and feel.
- Saving outlines as open HTML removed the lock-in objection that haunts note and outliner apps without giving up structure.
- Staying a single-developer, local-file product meant no server to run and no sync architecture forcing compromises on file size or format.
What it did
Shown on Hacker News on 2022-05-17, Bike drew 513 points and 236 comments. In the thread Grosjean explained that 'fluidity' is animation and that a tool for thought should feel good, defended local files in open HTML against web outliners such as Workflowy and Logseq, and explained why a single developer would not build multi-user sync.
What you can take
In a mature category, compete on the two things everyone already feels: speed and motion — then remove lock-in by saving in open formats that any future tool can read.
Since then
In the launch thread Grosjean was explicit about scope: multi-user real-time sync was unlikely because he is a single developer not ready to run a server, and his roadmap prioritized more basic features plus an iOS version of Bike. When a commenter who used TaskPaper asked how the two differ, he pointed to a support post on their relationship and listed the distinctions — native resources, open HTML files and speed on big outlines. The product page, re-fetched in 2026, still leads with the same promises: fluid motion and the Moby Dick Workout.
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