Welcome — start here

[nyblnet]

Discussions are open. This is the place for questions, ideas and showing what you've built — issues stay for bugs.

What Bento is, in one line

One HTML file that is the document, the viewer and the editor at once. Open it from a disk, a server or an email attachment; it works offline and it saves itself. bento/slides is the first app; bento/spaces (notes) and bento/dash (sheets & tables) follow.

Where things go

Q&A	How do I…? Answers here are searchable, so they help the next person too
Ideas	Feature requests and rough thoughts, before they're worth an issue
Show and tell	Decks you've made, things you've built on the format
Issues	Bugs. Include browser, OS, and a minimal .bento.html if you can
SECURITY.md	Security problems — please not a public issue

If you want to contribute code

Two things are worth knowing before you start, because both have already cost contributors real work:

Check what's in flight first. Several things are usually half-built at once, and twice now someone has written a thousand-plus lines that duplicated an open PR. That's a visibility failure on my side, which that pinned issue exists to fix — but please skim it and the open PRs, and say what you're planning before building anything substantial.

PLATFORM.md §1–2 don't bend. A Bento file works with no backend, no CDN and no network to open, edit, present or save; and the #bento-doc splice contract is frozen because shipped files depend on it. A change that breaks either can't be merged however good the code is. A well-made pull request was declined on exactly this recently — it lazily fetched a 2MB library, which is off-platform no matter how carefully it's done.

AI-assisted contributions are welcome — I use AI on this repo too. Just review what you submit as if you'd written every line, and commit under your own name rather than a bot identity. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Where things stand

1.0.10 is current, and shipped files update themselves through the signed release channel. Recently landed: LaTeX maths that morphs symbol by symbol, twenty-one installable language packs, and photos and video working in live collaboration. In progress: a native iOS host so decks save in place on iPhone and iPad.

Thanks for being here — and for the ~2,000 of you who showed up after the Show HN thread.