Features Group III — Editor Element 19

A note editor built block-first — not document-first.

Most rich text editors are document editors retrofitted for notes. Knovya is the other way around: twenty-two block types, AI that signs its own work, multiplayer in every keystroke — built on the open-source BlockNote and ProseMirror libraries. The editor is free forever; AI features draw on a shared credit pool.

22 Block types
5 Families
6 Editing modes
24 Code languages
Block Editor
Experiment 02 · The Lab

Type slash. Compose a note.

A working slice of the editor. Pick a block on the left — it lands in your note on the right. Reorder, remove, swap. The same surface that lives in every Knovya page.

0 blocks
Press / on the left to insert your first block, or pick a preset below.
Free ships every block type. The editor is never paywalled. AI blocks draw on AI credits — 50/mo Free, 500/mo Pro → See pricing
All twenty-two · five families

Twenty-two block types, five families.

Each block answers a different question about a piece of content. Together they cover everything a knowledge worker, writer, or product team writes — and the AI family is where Knovya stops looking like every other editor.

Family I Inline
9 blocks
paragraph prose, the default unit
heading H1 — H6, structural anchors
bulletListItem unordered, nested
numberedListItem ordered, nested
checkListItem tasks, toggle complete
quote attribution-aware
callout info / warning / success / error
toggle collapsible section
toggleHeading collapsible heading
Family II Layout
4 blocks
divider section break
multiColumn 2 — 4 columns side-by-side
tabGroup up to 5 tabbed panels
tableOfContents auto-generated from headings
Family III Media
4 blocks
image caption, alt, lightbox, resize
videoEmbed YouTube, Vimeo, mp4 / webm
embed Figma, CodeSandbox, Loom, more
fileAttachment any type, any size up to limit
Family IV Technical
4 blocks
codeBlock CodeMirror, 24 languages
math LaTeX, KaTeX-rendered
mermaid flow, sequence, class diagrams
table rows, headers, inline cells
Family V · ★ AI
1 block — Knovya-only
agentBadge marks which agent drafted a section, what action, what moment — readable to people and to other agents through MCP

Rich text editors were built for documents — and your second brain isn't a document.

Word was for memos. Pages was for letters. TinyMCE, CKEditor, Quill — for blog posts and CMS forms. Lexical was built for status updates at scale.

They are fine document editors. None of them were built for notes. Notes are smaller, denser, more structural, more cross-linked. They live next to a thousand other notes, get edited in fragments, get co-authored by humans and agents. The block was the right primitive — and almost no editor library starts there.

The cost
Knowledge workers paste, restructure, and reformat between three apps because their editor was built for a different shape.
The fix
Start from the block. Make every block addressable, draggable, transformable. Then build everything else on top.
The lineage

From WYSIWYG to block-as-primitive.

Knovya's editor stands on a fifty-year line of editing paradigms. Five ancestors taught it how to think.

  1. 1974
    Xerox Bravo — WYSIWYG The first editor where the screen showed the printed page. What you see is what you get — the foundation every text editor still inherits from. Xerox PARC · Simonyi & Lampson
  2. 2017
    ProseMirror 1.0 — content model Marijn Haverbeke shipped a rigorous schema-based content model with transactions, plugins, and a real undo history. The editor stopped being a contenteditable div. Marijn Haverbeke · open source
  3. 2018
    Notion 2.0 — block-as-primitive Every paragraph, heading, table, embed became a draggable, addressable block. The block went mainstream — and a generation of knowledge workers learned to type slash. Notion Labs · product release
  4. 2022
    BlockNote — open-source Notion-style TypeCellOS opened the block paradigm by shipping a polished editor on top of ProseMirror and Tiptap, MPL-2.0 licensed, with built-in slash menus, drag handles, and Yjs collaboration. TypeCellOS · open source
  5. 2026
    Knovya Block Editor Twenty-two block types, agentBadge attribution, six editor modes, markdown-native round-trip. Block-as-primitive — extended for the AI-co-authored era. ★ Knovya · production
First of its kind

Nobody else signs the AI's work.

Notion has AI. Obsidian has plugins. TipTap has slash menus. Lexical has performance. None of them mark which blocks were drafted by an agent — let alone which agent, which action, which moment. Knovya's agentBadge block is provenance by default — readable in the page, addressable through MCP.

  • Notion AI as chat overlay
  • Obsidian AI via community plugins
  • TipTap developer toolkit
  • Lexical framework, no AI layer
  • Quill / TinyMCE classical WYSIWYG
  • ★ Knovya block-level provenance
Surfaces

The editor lives in four moments.

Each surface is a place where you reach for the editor and it reaches back. Four daily-driver patterns — slash, select, sign, sort.

Slash menu type / to open

A keystroke away from every block type. Search by name, scroll by family. The same surface the Lab above is built from.

/cal
Callout ↵
Code block ↓ ↑
Table
Math (LaTeX)
Selection bar select to format

Bold, italic, link, color — and one button rivals don't have: edit with AI. Sends the selected blocks straight to the AI drawer with full context.

B I U ⎌ edit with AI
The auth migration plan is now complete and verified — ship date set for next Tuesday, pending one final review.
Agent attribution ★ Knovya-only

When an AI co-edits a section, an agentBadge stays attached. People see who wrote what; agents through MCP can read provenance without guessing.

The retro covered three themes:
release cadence stayed steady but cross-team handoffs introduced friction; resolution paths converged on a shared decision log.
claude · rewrote · 2m ago
Action items recorded in the decision log.
Drag handle gutter grab and reorder

Hover any block, the handle appears in the gutter. Grab to reorder, click to open the block menu — convert, duplicate, transform, delete.

The proposal lands well in usability tests.
"The structure made decisions easier to find." — interview, Mar 14
npm install @blocknote/core
Bonded with

Block Editor composes with the rest of Group III.

20
Real-time
Yjs CRDT under every block. Multiplayer in every keystroke.
21
Templates
Pre-arranged block compositions for the most common notes.
24
Import
Notion, Obsidian, Markdown — preserving block structure.
23
Export
Markdown, HTML, PDF, DOCX, JSON — clean round-trip.
Frequently asked

A few honest answers.

What is a block-based editor?
A block-based editor treats every paragraph, heading, image, callout, code block, and embed as a discrete unit you can drag, nest, transform, and reorder — instead of treating the document as one long stream of text. Knovya ships twenty-two block types, all interoperable, all keyboard-driven.
How is Knovya's editor different from Notion's?
Knovya is markdown-native — what you type round-trips cleanly to Markdown for export, import, and version diffs. Knovya is AI-aware at the block level — every AI-drafted section is signed with an agentBadge that records the agent, action, and moment. And Knovya is multiplayer through Yjs CRDT in every block, not only at the page level.
Is the editor open source?
Knovya's editor is built on BlockNote, the open-source block-based editor library by TypeCellOS, which itself is built on ProseMirror by Marijn Haverbeke and Tiptap. Knovya contributes back custom blocks like agentBadge upstream where the open-source license permits.
Can I use markdown shortcuts?
Yes. Type # for heading, - for bullet list, > for quote, ``` for code, $$ for math, --- for divider. Every shortcut maps to its native Knovya block — and exports cleanly as Markdown when you want your note to live anywhere else.
What is the agentBadge block?
A Knovya-specific block type that marks which AI agent drafted or edited a section, what action was taken, and when. When Claude rewrites a paragraph through the AI drawer, that section carries an agentBadge — readable to you and to other agents through MCP. Provenance, by default.
Are AI features included on Free?
All twenty-two block types and the full editing surface are free forever. AI features — co-edit, transforms, ghost completion — share a credit pool. Free includes 50 AI credits per month; Pro raises that to 500. The editor itself is never paywalled. See pricing.
Does the editor work offline?
The web app needs a connection to sync; Knovya Desktop on Tauri (in development) ships with a local SQLite store and full offline editing. CRDT-backed merge means you can edit on a plane and re-sync without conflict when you land.

Open the editor. Start writing.

Twenty-two block types from minute one. AI credits, version history, and end-to-end encryption when you grow into them.

Start free See pricing
★   element 19 · Group III — Editor