Capture without friction (and why we're not adding more buttons)
Every UI button is a tax on the act of capture. Here's why tentus's editor stays nearly empty, and what's behind that restraint.
The editor is the part of a notes app you stare at most. So of course it's where every product is tempted to put more buttons.
Slash menus, formatting toolbars, AI shortcuts, templates, embeds, comment threads. Each one solves a real problem for some user. Stack enough of them and the editor becomes a flight deck — and capture, the thing the editor exists for, becomes the thing you put off.
The discipline
tentus's editor opens nearly empty. A title field. A body field. Markdown shortcuts and a small slash menu when you need them. That's it.
The discipline isn't aesthetic. It's about latency. The lower the cognitive cost of opening a capture, the more often you do it. The more often you capture, the better tentus gets, because Lumi has more to work with. So every button we don't add is, paradoxically, an investment in what the product can eventually do for you.
What we did add
A keyboard shortcut from anywhere in the app. A clipper that grabs web pages cleanly. Voice capture that transcribes in the background. A paste handler that figures out what you're pasting and stores it correctly.
Notice the pattern: every one of those reduces friction on the way in. None of them is a flight-deck button on the way out.
What you won't see
AI buttons in the editor. We talked about this for a long time. Buttons that say 'summarize this,' 'expand this,' 'rewrite this in a different tone.' The temptation is strong.
But every one of those moves you out of the work of thinking and into the work of supervising an AI. That's the opposite of what a quiet thinking tool should do. Lumi sits in its own surface, called when you want it, silent when you don't.