Design records
These are the design, research and measurement records behind Niman’s features — not how-to documentation, and not kept current with the code. Each was written while a feature was designed or a decision was taken, and says what was measured, which options were rejected and why. They are kept because the numbers and the reasons are the argument a later change has to answer.
Moved here from docs/dev/ on 2026-09-25. docs/dev/ now holds only
the living documentation — architecture, building, conventions and the
release process. The records’ content is unchanged apart from the links
that followed the move; the code and the tests cite them by path in
comments (docs/records/<name>.md).
| Record | What it covers |
|---|---|
| unified-surface.md | Research and design for one Markdown surface — built (#247) |
| editor-alternatives.md | The WYSIWYG packages measured and rejected before that decision |
| read-live-parity.md | Where the read view and live stand, and the decisions that aligned them |
| huge-notes.md | The 246 MB note: what was measured and what changed because of it |
| desktop-performance.md | The desktop audit (#62): the cold-start and integration-test baseline, the animation inventory and the proposed policy |
| workspace.md | The open-note model — tabs and panes (#23) |
| epub-reader.md | Reading an EPUB into Markdown (#280) |
| annotations.md | Annotating a PDF or a book in a companion note (#284) |
| sync.md | Note history and WebDAV sync: the decisions, settled before the code |
| index-reconcile.md | The index scan, a directory at a time with bounded memory (#302) |
| transcription.md | On-device speech-to-text with whisper_ggml |
| review-v0.1.3.md | Code review of everything merged after v0.1.3: what was fixed, what is open |