Every few days I'd need to do something small and annoying to a bit of text. Convert it to binary. Strip weird formatting out of something I pasted. Wrap a string in JSON. And every time, the free online tool for it wanted me to clear a cookie wall first, or sat there reloading an ad, or made me paste text I didn't really want to hand over into a box that quietly POSTs it to someone's server.
So I built my own, and made them all run in the browser.
It's called ShifText: https://shiftext.com
The rule I set myself was that your text never leaves the page. Every tool does its work in JavaScript, right there in the browser. Nothing you type gets sent anywhere, there's no account, no upload, and once the page has loaded it keeps working offline.
That turned out to be less of a limitation than I expected. Case conversion, formatting, encoding like binary and hex and Caesar cipher, string-to-JSON, the various Unicode text generators, they're all just functions of their input. None of them actually need a server. A lot of "online tools" POST your text off to a backend and I'm fairly sure it's habit more than necessity.
The Unicode stuff was the part that ate my time. Small caps and strikethrough text aren't fonts, they're separate Unicode characters (or combining marks, in the strikethrough case), so building them means mapping every letter and then dealing with the letters Unicode just doesn't have an equivalent for. You end up making a lot of small judgement calls about what to do when there's no clean substitute.
On the privacy claim: I know "we respect your privacy" is worth nothing when everyone says it. The reason I trust the client-side version is that you can check it. The text processing happens on the page, so what you type doesn't go anywhere. There is analytics on the site, heatmaps mostly, so I can see which tools trip people up, but it's consent-gated, it respects Global Privacy Control, and the text you type is masked out before anything gets recorded. Turn it off or block it and everything still works.
Full list, roughly: the case tools (upper, lower, caps, capitalisation), a string formatter and a text formatter, string-to-JSON, binary translator, hex to text, a Caesar cipher tool, an HTML viewer, and then the text style generators, strikethrough, small caps, big text, cursed/zalgo, invisible text, wingdings.
It's free and there's nothing to sign up for. If you try it and something obvious is missing, tell me, I've mostly been adding tools based on what people say they actually reach for.
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