You beat me to it by a day! But well done Luca. The tool looks excellent and I'm trying it out now.
I'm building Sig <https://github.com/adamjramirez/sig-releases> and the architecture overlap is obvious: macOS, plain markdown, git-versioned, designed as context for AI agents.
The difference is where in the workflow we start. Tolaria seems to excel at organizing knowledge that already exists. Sig is trying to solve what happens before that - how to get the knowledge out of your head and into files in the first place. Most of what actually determines the quality of your AI output was never written down: the decision made in the last five minutes of a meeting, the verbal commitment with no follow-up, your actual read on what a conversation meant (not the surface version).
Sig's capture is two layers: 1) factual record first, 2) your personal interpretation on top. Both stored as markdown on your machine. When you're ready to share to a team knowledge base/open brain, it's an explicit decision to do so and opt-in — private by default, team-readable only when you choose.
if "git versioned" means the .md files themselves, I'm sold. I am actually processing files using a git based workflow in order to tell claude what to look at.
Yes, the .md's are in their own repo, locally. The entire UI is a layer on top of that repo. The UI has some underlying mechanisms that abstract the git operations away from the user, but that doesn't stop a power user from jumping in the shell and accessing the repo directly.
The "magic" starts when Sig contributes to another, remote repo - a central knowledge base that all teammates' local Sig can pull from, and contribute toward.
I love this! It is like you have taken all the things I want from Obsidian (plus plug-ins) and made them into a single, well designed app. Great!
Feedback:
* This is so good you should find a way to keep it open source but also profit from it so you can develop it full-time. You could just have an official app version - I would pay for that.
* Feature creep. I am a big fan of Bear App for it's wonderful simple design, although I stopped using it because it doesn't work on markdown files directly. What I've seen is that equivalent apps/services (including Obsidian, Notion, Craft) are continuously adding new features. You've already got all the core features I think - try to avoid feature creep, and keep it focused on just doing the core things really well, like Bear App does.
Yeah, so sad it is dead. I mean it works, but no more high progress. So it is a legacy. But it worked so fast and smooth :(
At the same time Craft is too focused to replace Google Docs with swipes. Feels weird.
So have to use Notion from phone and VSCode with Claude code on computer. I miss normal implementation of Claude code on my phone :( I really wish to have always computer and access to it maybe. Official Claude code iOS app works weird.
Why did you build something different? What was the motivation compared to Bear?
I'm a heavy Bear user, recently migrating most stuff to Drafts. My problems with Bear is that it's getting slow and I don't have easy direct access to my text data. But it does have apps for all devices and drag&drop images are really useful for lab/electronics work…
For me the main issue with Bear is that it does not work with a directory of Markdown files, but locks them away in a database. If you worked directly on markdown files it would be nearly perfect. They did make a standalone markdown editor called Panda, but didn't pursue it for some reason.
> Everybody is building their own llm-wiki systems these days
there is a dark side to this. my coworker is insistent that his variant of this is going to become the teams backbone and i can't get him to stop even when i showed him a page of beyond wrong answers. he straight up doesn't understand that having a knowledge base != claude now sees all of it at once and can consider the endless breadth and shades of gray that make up human decisions. he's 100% convinced that claude grepping through the files is foolproof and won't miss any details lol
i personally just stopped messing with grand knowledge base ideas and these techs. i think everyone's shooting a lil too high and can't fully define what exactly they're after.
so i stepped back and i keep claude there for a very black and white need. claude's there to speed up stuff in domains i know well so i can guardrail him with massive success and have him code pieces im simply too lazy to code myself or alley oop something im struggling with. in a tortoise and the hare parable kind of way im the only guy here who isnt getting huge gotcha holes from AI in the solutions im delivering. all polished with the same attention to detail ive always had. i've just found these grand wiki everything ideas are just not yielding what people think they're yielding. for whatever reason i'm still the meatware layer thats a better index in the end if ive done my homework. perhaps something is lost when we cede a huge chunk of our journeys to seek information. i've still yet to be impressed by any "claude tied all these things together and found this insight this is insane" moments, every single time ive pointed out that any of that could've been a report.
Hey zby, if you're collecting these, Hjarni (hjarni.com) would fit your source-only tier alongside Fintool and Supermemory. Hosted SaaS with MCP built in, hierarchical LLM instructions (global/team/container/note), and a shared-note protocol for Claude/ChatGPT multi-agent workflows. Happy to write up a page in whatever shape you want.
The wishlist doc you linked is good, would be up for collaborating on that.
This is a really cool list and repository of ideas. Seems like the focus of the work is on making knowledge legible to AI. I wonder if you (or others) have done a similar level thinking about the inverse – making AI more legible to humans?
I often fall back to Apple Notes (I know not really a knowledge base, or markdown) because it syncs between my devices and it's usable on the phone. Is this something you have a need for yourself, or how are you looking at your notes on mobile?
The mobile capture gap is real and it's what kills most of these tools as daily drivers. The flow that's worked for me: Drafts (iOS) with an action configured to append to a dated inbox.md in a git repo, synced via Working Copy. The Markdown files are the source of truth; any macOS tool (Tolaria, Obsidian, whatever) reads from the same repo with no conversion step.
It's a few moving parts to set up, but the payoff is that mobile capture and desktop organization are actually the same files rather than a paste/sync step in between.
I built something recently for myself which is based on the any device philosophy using a Telegram bot approach and like the creator of this app uses a private Github repo as the source of truth.
I use it for just collecting anything I find interesting around the web.
I actually largely solved this with OpenClaw — i send stuff via telegram and it creates good notes in Tolaria, already linked to what exists and what's relevant
I send web links of tools that I want to store of resources, voice notes to be turned into written notes, etc
Despite being in the browser, the content of SDocs rendered Markdown files remain local to you. SDoc urls contain your markdown document's content in compressed base64 in the url fragment (the bit after the `#`):
https://sdocs.dev/#md=GzcFAMT...(this is the contents of your document)...
Beautiful project! I am using Obsidian for some time but not very happy with it lately.
I am still looking for a way how to integrate AI to help me with my knowledge base. Your project could be a fit. Will save it and watch how it evolves.
I have a question about markdown on MacBook Pro. You know the preview feature - I think it’s called quick quicklook - how can I get that to work for markdown? I’ve associated .md files to always open with my IDE, but they still don’t render with the preview which is a mild annoyance. In my IDE i do use an extension to render the Md so that could be why and I could understand why recursive invocation may not be exposed at or available to the preview extension level. But any suggestions?
I downloaded and am trying it out, but I'm running into a pretty annoying sorting bug that's preventing me from using it for real. I copied over files from my Obsidian vault (preserving file times), and the first time it loaded, everything seemed to work fine. After doing the first git commit, however, Tolaria cannot seem to sort properly by last modified anymore (I'm getting notes from 2023 or 2025 up at the top). The file system tree still has the correct modified and created times.
This was my workflow (this is repro-able 100%):
1. Take an obsidian vault (just a few folders and subfolders of markdown files)
2. Copy the entire folder (keep all of the dates with cp -a) to a new folder
3. Install Tolaria, point it to the new folder you created.
4. Open it up. This creates a git repository.
5. Click on the bottom UI to "Restore Tolaria AI Guidance." After this point, the sorting doesn't work and will continue failing. Everything says that it was created or modified recently.
Edit: I think I found the cause. When you initialize a git repository, the file modified times stay the same, but sorting by modified appears to sort by the commit date, which is now all the same for every file (since it was committed in one go)
Atomic looks quite interesting, and the "wiki synthesis" is particularly interesting:
I've been working on a suite of skills and a tiny MCP (also SQLite + SQLite-vec based) where the focus is on making it easy to produce "atoms" from quick brain dumps.
The chunking problem is "bypassed" by declaring each section a chunk, and having the LLMs rewrite drafts to sections that chunk well. That means lots of redundancy, and no "As explained above".
The intended reader isn't a human, but rather agents that generate human-friendlier prose, for different target audiences. By assuming the reader is an "expert", the idea is that it's much cheaper to mass-produce reviewed "atoms".
Itching to try that workflow with Atomic or Tolaria.
I started Tolaria in Swift but met very real limitations especially in the Markdown editor part. It's very hard to build something that is Notion like in that department with Swift.
I just built a markdown-style editor for iOS that is highly performant with files of 5000 lines.
Every keystroke is restyled in under 8ms: no debouncing, no delayed rendering. 20 rapid keystrokes are processed in 150ms with full restyling after each one. Tag and boolean searches complete in under 20ms. Visible-range rendering is 25x faster than full-document styling. 120Hz screen refresh supported.
App file size is 722 KB.
If I can do it on iOS then it's must be 10x easier on macOS.
At least for me it’s not about speed, but the npm ecosystem: I try to avoid running npm deps in my home computer (if any, I run them in VMs, but a KB should run in the host I believe)
Precisely. It would be awesome if it were an ACTUAL application.
I don’t care if it’s Tauri, Electron or whatever’s the new flavour of the same old lazy ass webwrapper technology.
A web app is not an actual application. Besides, I already have a browser, I don’t need another one just to open a single page so it can pretend to be an app while adhering to absolutely ZERO platform behaviour patterns.
Either go it native, or don’t even bother. If it can be run in a webwrapper, it can be run my ACTUAL a browser.
The “types as lenses, not schemas” principle and the focus on structure + relationships really stand out.
How do systems like this handle temporal stuff over time? (things that change over time, decisions that get revisited, outcomes that didn’t exist when the note was created?) Do those live as relationships between notes, or is there a different pattern for it?
For pure viewing rather than another editor, I’ve made a https://mdview.io - useful for opening Markdown files with clean rendering, tables, and Mermaid support and then share it with your colleges or save for later
That’s awesome! I’m a huge fan of projects like that. I recently launched ckourse.com (open-source) to help manage downloaded courses. Combining tolaria and Ckourse will give a smooth learning experience. Thanks for the tool.
On a tangential note, do you have any recommendations for course platforms that offer paid courses with videos being 100% without DRM?
I was severely disappointed late last year when I revisited one platform where I had previously dropped quite a bit of money in the past to buy access to many courses and I now wanted to finally download them for offline watching only to find that in each and every course I had bought access to on the platform it is only the first couple of videos that are without DRM and then all of the remaining videos in each of the courses use Widevine DRM.
I even investigated a bit whether Widewine DRM is possible to decrypt but it seems to be very difficult, requiring knowledge and access to things that I doubt I would be able to figure out.
I would rather in the future spend money on courses that are not DRM protected in the first place, than to give any more money to any learning platforms where they use DRM on the videos.
Topics of interest include:
- Advanced software development
- Distributed systems
- PostgreSQL database internals
- ZFS file system internals
- Debugging
- Reverse engineering
- 3d modelling in Blender and rendering
- Vulkan graphics programming
- Game development with Godot
- Piano playing techniques
- Electronic music production with Ableton Live
- Mixing and mastering tracks with Ableton Live + any third party VSTs necessary
- Drawing and painting digitally
- DJing, turntablism and scratching on digital DJ controllers
Sadly, most of the big names (Udemy, Coursera, ...) are using encrypted streaming with DRM, but there are Khan Academy, Harvard, MIT,... courses that you can download and use locally. But most people are downloading the courses from torrents illegally (I don't advise doing this).
Exciting stuff Luca. Cool to see you're using BlockNote as the editor (project I'm working on). Let us know if you have any feedback for us / features you'd love to see!
FYI your website mentions Mac and Linux compatibility but the website only shows a download link for Mac. I found the linux options on your gh account and will try it out.
I tried it and it looks really nice but like most of these it has too many small editing thorns for me to use. Two I noticed right away
- ctrl-a works to go to start of line but for some reason ctrl-e doesn't work to go to end
- ``` doesn't start a code block, you have to use 'insert code block'
Good job on paste image from clipboard though which is another feature that I think is completely essential for something like this and weirdly missing in many of them.
``` should definitely start a code block! I do it all the time, and also just tried it now. Can you try again or tell me what you see? Simply nothing happening?
Interesting to see this gaining traction so fast. The git-first approach for AI context is a smart differentiator from Obsidian, it lets you see exactly what the AI changed vs what you wrote.
Obsidian and these newer tools share markdown + local files, but they're aimed at different assumptions about who reads and edits the vault. Obsidian's default is "human reads and curates; plugins optionally enhance." The AI-first cohort (Tolaria, Sig in the sibling comment, and several others) assumes the AI reads and writes as a first-class agent, which makes design choices like how the app reacts to files changing underneath it (cf. the Zettlr comment downthread) a core concern rather than an edge case.
Worth watching how each of these tools positions the AI: as a UX copilot inside the editor, or as an autonomous agent with file-system access via local CLI/MCP.
It would be nice if you could “see” the AI in your vault making changes. Almost like a Google doc collab session. Even if you weren’t directly interacting with the agent, and it was making change thru a CLI/MCP, its presence would be highlighted in the frontend. And then it appears as its own contributor in the git history.
Git is great as the durable layer, but what fiatpandas is pointing at is a bit different — real-time awareness that the agent is active right now, not a retrospective diff.
I've been working on this split in a side project (https://github.com/rillmd/rill — vault layer on top of Claude Code). Git still handles the durable side for free, since the CLI agent just writes files and commits normally. The live side comes from Claude Code hooks (UserPromptSubmit / Stop / PostToolUse) appending to a plain activity-log.md that the Electron GUI tails. Cruder than Google Docs cursor presence, but cheap — and the log itself is just another markdown file in the vault, same data model as everything else.
One trade-off: going the other direction and letting the frontend detect edits via FSEvents-style watching runs straight into the reconciliation issues the Zettlr subthread is about. Hooks on the agent side are less elegant but sidestep the whole class.
Respectfully, did you use an LLM to write this comment? You're responding to flatpandas here. Having "what flatpands is pointing at..." is similar to the output of an LLM if you were to link to that comment and get a generated summary.
I wrote it. English is my second language, so I reach for "what X is pointing at" constructions a lot — partly as a self-check that I've parsed the parent correctly. If any specific claim in there looks wrong or generated, happy to have it pointed out.
Typically we'd see the second person "you/your/you're" used and not the third person ("flatpands") here, since you (tarr1124) are directly responding to their comment, as if in conversation with them. ie: "what you're pointing at..."
Otherwise it reads like you're ignoring them and talking around them.
Yeah, fair. The third-person thing is an old habit from parsing parents before I reply, but you're right that in a direct reply it reads cold. Second person from here on.
I get the obsidian question all the time! The differences are:
- better note organization with types and relationships
- different, more Notion-like UX
- first class support for git as sync + version control layer
- long tail of design decisions that help AI work well with vaults: types, MCP, git authorship, etc
- and most of all... open source!
And I was going to say Mac native as well, but uses Tauri. I’d love some app with the polish of Bear Notes but that just edited raw Markdown files. Ideally Obsidian with the Notebook Navigator plugin (strongly inspired by Bear Notes perhaps?) and (checks list) this very specific list of plugins that I need and should be good for everyone else thanks.
Really interesting project. I like that this seems focused on organizing relationships between ideas instead of just being another notes editor. A lot of tools handle documents well, but fewer help build an actual knowledge system.
Because ideally you would interface with all the stuff in your KB via an LLM (ideally local). The files are artifacts about knowledge and you can have super powers via an LLM. That's why, else you just use a note-taking app.
Hey luca, heavy obsidian user here and went through your website and github. Def will try it out. Connecting codex with Tolaria to manage your knowledgebase is something i'm looking forward to try.
I run a newsletter too, so this is cool to see! Not sure if I need it yet (my "knowledge base" is still pretty small), but I'll definitely keep it in mind for the future.
What about Microsoft OneNote...
I did not get why we need yet another app...
OneNote syncs to the cloud so I can keep my mobile and pc synced... and backed.
I can paste multimedia stuff...
My use case is keeping notes, screenshots sometimes, whatever in the same format sometimes...
Wouldn't you feel limited by the markdown. What is the use case?
The app looks very slick! Just read through the docs and a couple of the Looms.
This might be a dumb question, but what are people using these MD knowledge bases for? What has this unlocked for you, that you weren't doing before?
I kind of understand the wiki use case in large code bases, with lots of changes happening, but on a personal level it's not as clear to me. Is it just another place to store ideas? Is the hope that AI resurfaces or connects relevant bits later?
This seems like a way to optimize your personal life, but I'm not sure what the end goal is.
A lot of people are posting their similar projects in this thread. Is there anyone making a markdown knowledge management app that feels truly Mac-native, i.e. written in AppKit or SwiftUI rather than as a web page with an Electron/Tauri/whatever wrapper?
(No offense intended to OP, this looks like a cool project; I'm just looking for something else.)
One thing about obsidian is that it’s not open source. So if one day they change something and you don’t like it, you will be forced to use a different KB. That means to change your flows, the ux, etc. That’s a big downside from my pov (it’s good that obsidian allows you to take your files with you, but for me that’s not enough)
not gonna lie - wow the 10k notes over 6 years thing is what got me! most knowledge base tools fall apart at that scale because the organizing system becomes the job. wondering do you ever just let something be unstructured, or does everything have to be tagged in?
Personally, I don’t really care which flavour of webwrapper this is. If it ain’t native, I ain’t bothering. Web pages belong in the browser, not in a browser-container pretending to be something it is not—an actual app.
You're right. We should absolutely only rely on "Ask sales for price" closed-source software from megacorps, that get worse on every release, and get sunset anyway when the funding runs out.
Of all the things to judge this on, you chose the most ridiculous one. Why shouldn’t a project like this exist just because there are “bigger” alternatives out there?
If youre gonna shut this one down, at the very least do it for the right reasons such as the fact that this is a webwrapper—absolutely disgusting, either go native or don’t bother shoving your webpage into a browser-container and calling it what it is not (an app).
You beat me to it by a day! But well done Luca. The tool looks excellent and I'm trying it out now.
I'm building Sig <https://github.com/adamjramirez/sig-releases> and the architecture overlap is obvious: macOS, plain markdown, git-versioned, designed as context for AI agents.
The difference is where in the workflow we start. Tolaria seems to excel at organizing knowledge that already exists. Sig is trying to solve what happens before that - how to get the knowledge out of your head and into files in the first place. Most of what actually determines the quality of your AI output was never written down: the decision made in the last five minutes of a meeting, the verbal commitment with no follow-up, your actual read on what a conversation meant (not the surface version).
Sig's capture is two layers: 1) factual record first, 2) your personal interpretation on top. Both stored as markdown on your machine. When you're ready to share to a team knowledge base/open brain, it's an explicit decision to do so and opt-in — private by default, team-readable only when you choose.
if "git versioned" means the .md files themselves, I'm sold. I am actually processing files using a git based workflow in order to tell claude what to look at.
I'll definitely give this a spin.
Yes, the .md's are in their own repo, locally. The entire UI is a layer on top of that repo. The UI has some underlying mechanisms that abstract the git operations away from the user, but that doesn't stop a power user from jumping in the shell and accessing the repo directly.
The "magic" starts when Sig contributes to another, remote repo - a central knowledge base that all teammates' local Sig can pull from, and contribute toward.
I love this! It is like you have taken all the things I want from Obsidian (plus plug-ins) and made them into a single, well designed app. Great!
Feedback:
* This is so good you should find a way to keep it open source but also profit from it so you can develop it full-time. You could just have an official app version - I would pay for that.
* Feature creep. I am a big fan of Bear App for it's wonderful simple design, although I stopped using it because it doesn't work on markdown files directly. What I've seen is that equivalent apps/services (including Obsidian, Notion, Craft) are continuously adding new features. You've already got all the core features I think - try to avoid feature creep, and keep it focused on just doing the core things really well, like Bear App does.
big fan of Bear! It was a big influence for Tolaria — that's why you like it!
thank you for the great feedback mate
Yeah, so sad it is dead. I mean it works, but no more high progress. So it is a legacy. But it worked so fast and smooth :(
At the same time Craft is too focused to replace Google Docs with swipes. Feels weird.
So have to use Notion from phone and VSCode with Claude code on computer. I miss normal implementation of Claude code on my phone :( I really wish to have always computer and access to it maybe. Official Claude code iOS app works weird.
Why did you build something different? What was the motivation compared to Bear?
I'm a heavy Bear user, recently migrating most stuff to Drafts. My problems with Bear is that it's getting slow and I don't have easy direct access to my text data. But it does have apps for all devices and drag&drop images are really useful for lab/electronics work…
For me the main issue with Bear is that it does not work with a directory of Markdown files, but locks them away in a database. If you worked directly on markdown files it would be nearly perfect. They did make a standalone markdown editor called Panda, but didn't pursue it for some reason.
Everybody is building their own llm-wiki systems these days. I have my own and compiled a big list of other agent memory systems in it: https://zby.github.io/commonplace/agent-memory-systems/ I'll add yours promptly.
And just today I also vibed a wish list (based on all the material I gathered) for such systems: https://zby.github.io/commonplace/notes/designing-agent-memo...
I wish we could collaborate.
> Everybody is building their own llm-wiki systems these days
there is a dark side to this. my coworker is insistent that his variant of this is going to become the teams backbone and i can't get him to stop even when i showed him a page of beyond wrong answers. he straight up doesn't understand that having a knowledge base != claude now sees all of it at once and can consider the endless breadth and shades of gray that make up human decisions. he's 100% convinced that claude grepping through the files is foolproof and won't miss any details lol
i personally just stopped messing with grand knowledge base ideas and these techs. i think everyone's shooting a lil too high and can't fully define what exactly they're after.
so i stepped back and i keep claude there for a very black and white need. claude's there to speed up stuff in domains i know well so i can guardrail him with massive success and have him code pieces im simply too lazy to code myself or alley oop something im struggling with. in a tortoise and the hare parable kind of way im the only guy here who isnt getting huge gotcha holes from AI in the solutions im delivering. all polished with the same attention to detail ive always had. i've just found these grand wiki everything ideas are just not yielding what people think they're yielding. for whatever reason i'm still the meatware layer thats a better index in the end if ive done my homework. perhaps something is lost when we cede a huge chunk of our journeys to seek information. i've still yet to be impressed by any "claude tied all these things together and found this insight this is insane" moments, every single time ive pointed out that any of that could've been a report.
Here's another one for your list https://github.com/Signet-AI/signetai I am not affiliated, just testing it out.
Added: https://zby.github.io/commonplace/agent-memory-systems/revie...
By the way - here is the prompt for these reviews: https://github.com/zby/commonplace/blob/main/kb/agent-memory...
Hey zby, if you're collecting these, Hjarni (hjarni.com) would fit your source-only tier alongside Fintool and Supermemory. Hosted SaaS with MCP built in, hierarchical LLM instructions (global/team/container/note), and a shared-note protocol for Claude/ChatGPT multi-agent workflows. Happy to write up a page in whatever shape you want.
The wishlist doc you linked is good, would be up for collaborating on that.
The other reviews are based on published articles - but I am not sure if I want to continue this - because it is hard to keep them honest.
Maybe you can use the instructions from my repo - which are here: https://github.com/zby/commonplace/blob/main/kb/agent-memory... and run them on your code directory? Then send me the result.
This is a really cool list and repository of ideas. Seems like the focus of the work is on making knowledge legible to AI. I wonder if you (or others) have done a similar level thinking about the inverse – making AI more legible to humans?
I wish I'd found some for neovim on that list.
I often fall back to Apple Notes (I know not really a knowledge base, or markdown) because it syncs between my devices and it's usable on the phone. Is this something you have a need for yourself, or how are you looking at your notes on mobile?
I solve it by using Apple Notes for quick capture and then copy pasting from my mac to obsidian daily/specific notes, that I want to keep.
I also just keep long running notes for tracking things workouts and meals with headers for dates.
Works better than things like obsidian mobile and copy pasting is a natural filter.
Good tips!
>I also just keep long running notes for tracking things workouts and meals with headers for dates.
This I'd say fine on the phone but frustrating heading to the Mac and start wishing for at least a spreadsheet.
> start wishing for at least a spreadsheet
What exactly makes you wish that? I used to use google sheets for workouts but realised:
1. plain text notes are more ergonomic on the phone
2. dumping them into Claude produces more useful analysis than I could hope to extract for the same amount of effort.
The mobile capture gap is real and it's what kills most of these tools as daily drivers. The flow that's worked for me: Drafts (iOS) with an action configured to append to a dated inbox.md in a git repo, synced via Working Copy. The Markdown files are the source of truth; any macOS tool (Tolaria, Obsidian, whatever) reads from the same repo with no conversion step.
It's a few moving parts to set up, but the payoff is that mobile capture and desktop organization are actually the same files rather than a paste/sync step in between.
Bebop⁽¹⁾ is my preferred method. I can open it directly and capture an idea or note with one tap, or use its share sheet to capture links.
It can be configured to append to an Obsidian “Daily Note” in an iCloud vault, which works great.
No third-party services FTW.
⁽¹⁾ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bebop-quick-notes/id6477824795
I built something recently for myself which is based on the any device philosophy using a Telegram bot approach and like the creator of this app uses a private Github repo as the source of truth.
I use it for just collecting anything I find interesting around the web.
https://github.com/momentmaker/to
I actually largely solved this with OpenClaw — i send stuff via telegram and it creates good notes in Tolaria, already linked to what exists and what's relevant
I send web links of tools that I want to store of resources, voice notes to be turned into written notes, etc
but I will still build a mobile version for sure!
I've been using octarine[1] recently (after having used obsidian for quite a while), but I'm definitely going to try this out.
[1]: https://octarine.app
I love how you have used markdown here !
We kind of have used the exact philosophy in https://voiden.md/ - offline-first, file based and support for git.
This is exactly the format agents will use pretty well.
We have done this for APIs.
We are open source too. Take a look here : https://github.com/VoidenHQ/voiden
As I was scrolling down the page I was like "what if I wanted to use a notion-style editor instead of markdown" and my requests were instantly met
This is a beautiful project. Well done.
This problem has risen to the top of many people’s minds at this moment (including mine!). My Show HN for a similar cli + web based solution (https://sdocs.dev) was on the /show page a few days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633).
SDocs is cli -> instantly rendered on web
Despite being in the browser, the content of SDocs rendered Markdown files remain local to you. SDoc urls contain your markdown document's content in compressed base64 in the url fragment (the bit after the `#`):
The url fragment is never sent to the server (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F...: "The fragment is not sent to the server when the URI is requested; it is processed by the client").The sdocs.dev webapp is purely a client side decoding and rendering engine for the content stored in the url fragment.
This also means you can share your .md files privately by sharing the url.
Beautiful project! I am using Obsidian for some time but not very happy with it lately.
I am still looking for a way how to integrate AI to help me with my knowledge base. Your project could be a fit. Will save it and watch how it evolves.
I have a question about markdown on MacBook Pro. You know the preview feature - I think it’s called quick quicklook - how can I get that to work for markdown? I’ve associated .md files to always open with my IDE, but they still don’t render with the preview which is a mild annoyance. In my IDE i do use an extension to render the Md so that could be why and I could understand why recursive invocation may not be exposed at or available to the preview extension level. But any suggestions?
I built https://sdocs.dev which solves this pain point.
You can “sdoc file.md” to instantly open it.
It was discussed on Hacker News here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633
Look for a quicklook markdown plugin. Google found this: https://github.com/sbarex/QLMarkdown
I use https://github.com/sbarex/QLMarkdown and find it useful.
use leaf, quick install and standalone binary : https://github.com/RivoLink/leaf
Nice work! This looks really cool.
I downloaded and am trying it out, but I'm running into a pretty annoying sorting bug that's preventing me from using it for real. I copied over files from my Obsidian vault (preserving file times), and the first time it loaded, everything seemed to work fine. After doing the first git commit, however, Tolaria cannot seem to sort properly by last modified anymore (I'm getting notes from 2023 or 2025 up at the top). The file system tree still has the correct modified and created times.
that's weird will look into it! thanks for reporting
This was my workflow (this is repro-able 100%): 1. Take an obsidian vault (just a few folders and subfolders of markdown files) 2. Copy the entire folder (keep all of the dates with cp -a) to a new folder 3. Install Tolaria, point it to the new folder you created. 4. Open it up. This creates a git repository. 5. Click on the bottom UI to "Restore Tolaria AI Guidance." After this point, the sorting doesn't work and will continue failing. Everything says that it was created or modified recently.
Edit: I think I found the cause. When you initialize a git repository, the file modified times stay the same, but sorting by modified appears to sort by the commit date, which is now all the same for every file (since it was committed in one go)
Nice work, couple bits of feedback
* The editor doesn't seem to support code fence literals (as in I can't type ``` to get a code block)
* At very large markdown file sizes the performance is not great.
I'm building an obsidian-style markdown editor (for my own AI knowledge base product!) over at https://github.com/kenforthewin/atomic-editor
Atomic looks quite interesting, and the "wiki synthesis" is particularly interesting:
I've been working on a suite of skills and a tiny MCP (also SQLite + SQLite-vec based) where the focus is on making it easy to produce "atoms" from quick brain dumps.
The chunking problem is "bypassed" by declaring each section a chunk, and having the LLMs rewrite drafts to sections that chunk well. That means lots of redundancy, and no "As explained above".
The intended reader isn't a human, but rather agents that generate human-friendlier prose, for different target audiences. By assuming the reader is an "expert", the idea is that it's much cheaper to mass-produce reviewed "atoms".
Itching to try that workflow with Atomic or Tolaria.
I would be all over this if it was a native macOS app
I started Tolaria in Swift but met very real limitations especially in the Markdown editor part. It's very hard to build something that is Notion like in that department with Swift.
But give it a try because Tauri is very fast
I just built a markdown-style editor for iOS that is highly performant with files of 5000 lines.
Every keystroke is restyled in under 8ms: no debouncing, no delayed rendering. 20 rapid keystrokes are processed in 150ms with full restyling after each one. Tag and boolean searches complete in under 20ms. Visible-range rendering is 25x faster than full-document styling. 120Hz screen refresh supported.
App file size is 722 KB.
If I can do it on iOS then it's must be 10x easier on macOS.
https://www.gingerbeardman.com/apps/papertrail/
At least for me it’s not about speed, but the npm ecosystem: I try to avoid running npm deps in my home computer (if any, I run them in VMs, but a KB should run in the host I believe)
Agree, the npm ecosystem is increasingly becoming an security liability.
Curious if you looked at using SwiftDown (https://github.com/qeude/SwiftDown), MarkupEditor (https://github.com/stevengharris/MarkupEditor) or any other libraries for live/WYSIWYG Markdown editing.
Check out mdnb.app, a true native markdown app for macOS.
Precisely. It would be awesome if it were an ACTUAL application.
I don’t care if it’s Tauri, Electron or whatever’s the new flavour of the same old lazy ass webwrapper technology.
A web app is not an actual application. Besides, I already have a browser, I don’t need another one just to open a single page so it can pretend to be an app while adhering to absolutely ZERO platform behaviour patterns.
Either go it native, or don’t even bother. If it can be run in a webwrapper, it can be run my ACTUAL a browser.
FUCK WEB APPS.
The “types as lenses, not schemas” principle and the focus on structure + relationships really stand out. How do systems like this handle temporal stuff over time? (things that change over time, decisions that get revisited, outcomes that didn’t exist when the note was created?) Do those live as relationships between notes, or is there a different pattern for it?
For pure viewing rather than another editor, I’ve made a https://mdview.io - useful for opening Markdown files with clean rendering, tables, and Mermaid support and then share it with your colleges or save for later
That’s awesome! I’m a huge fan of projects like that. I recently launched ckourse.com (open-source) to help manage downloaded courses. Combining tolaria and Ckourse will give a smooth learning experience. Thanks for the tool.
On a tangential note, do you have any recommendations for course platforms that offer paid courses with videos being 100% without DRM?
I was severely disappointed late last year when I revisited one platform where I had previously dropped quite a bit of money in the past to buy access to many courses and I now wanted to finally download them for offline watching only to find that in each and every course I had bought access to on the platform it is only the first couple of videos that are without DRM and then all of the remaining videos in each of the courses use Widevine DRM.
I even investigated a bit whether Widewine DRM is possible to decrypt but it seems to be very difficult, requiring knowledge and access to things that I doubt I would be able to figure out.
I would rather in the future spend money on courses that are not DRM protected in the first place, than to give any more money to any learning platforms where they use DRM on the videos.
Topics of interest include:
- Advanced software development
- Distributed systems
- PostgreSQL database internals
- ZFS file system internals
- Debugging
- Reverse engineering
- 3d modelling in Blender and rendering
- Vulkan graphics programming
- Game development with Godot
- Piano playing techniques
- Electronic music production with Ableton Live
- Mixing and mastering tracks with Ableton Live + any third party VSTs necessary
- Drawing and painting digitally
- DJing, turntablism and scratching on digital DJ controllers
Sadly, most of the big names (Udemy, Coursera, ...) are using encrypted streaming with DRM, but there are Khan Academy, Harvard, MIT,... courses that you can download and use locally. But most people are downloading the courses from torrents illegally (I don't advise doing this).
Exciting stuff Luca. Cool to see you're using BlockNote as the editor (project I'm working on). Let us know if you have any feedback for us / features you'd love to see!
FYI your website mentions Mac and Linux compatibility but the website only shows a download link for Mac. I found the linux options on your gh account and will try it out.
I tried it and it looks really nice but like most of these it has too many small editing thorns for me to use. Two I noticed right away
- ctrl-a works to go to start of line but for some reason ctrl-e doesn't work to go to end
- ``` doesn't start a code block, you have to use 'insert code block'
Good job on paste image from clipboard though which is another feature that I think is completely essential for something like this and weirdly missing in many of them.
``` should definitely start a code block! I do it all the time, and also just tried it now. Can you try again or tell me what you see? Simply nothing happening?
ah I see it needs a space. I tried
```[ENTER]
and
```python[ENTER]
and I also assumed there was no code highlighting but I see after I add a code block I can select the language through the UI
```[SPACE] works, but immediately places the cursor below the block where I'm more used to the cursor moving into the block after creation
Super nice! I've ended up settling on Logseq for note-taking for a while now, but never loved the UI.
This is clean and love the git-backed approach. Would love to see a dark mode too!
I love this. Markdown first just makes more sense for knowledge bases. Love the clean ui. I came to same conclusion and built https://github.com/LostWarrior/knowledge-base (cli).
Interesting to see this gaining traction so fast. The git-first approach for AI context is a smart differentiator from Obsidian, it lets you see exactly what the AI changed vs what you wrote.
Doesn’t Obsidian already do pretty much the same?
Obsidian and these newer tools share markdown + local files, but they're aimed at different assumptions about who reads and edits the vault. Obsidian's default is "human reads and curates; plugins optionally enhance." The AI-first cohort (Tolaria, Sig in the sibling comment, and several others) assumes the AI reads and writes as a first-class agent, which makes design choices like how the app reacts to files changing underneath it (cf. the Zettlr comment downthread) a core concern rather than an edge case.
Worth watching how each of these tools positions the AI: as a UX copilot inside the editor, or as an autonomous agent with file-system access via local CLI/MCP.
It would be nice if you could “see” the AI in your vault making changes. Almost like a Google doc collab session. Even if you weren’t directly interacting with the agent, and it was making change thru a CLI/MCP, its presence would be highlighted in the frontend. And then it appears as its own contributor in the git history.
Git is great as the durable layer, but what fiatpandas is pointing at is a bit different — real-time awareness that the agent is active right now, not a retrospective diff.
I've been working on this split in a side project (https://github.com/rillmd/rill — vault layer on top of Claude Code). Git still handles the durable side for free, since the CLI agent just writes files and commits normally. The live side comes from Claude Code hooks (UserPromptSubmit / Stop / PostToolUse) appending to a plain activity-log.md that the Electron GUI tails. Cruder than Google Docs cursor presence, but cheap — and the log itself is just another markdown file in the vault, same data model as everything else.
One trade-off: going the other direction and letting the frontend detect edits via FSEvents-style watching runs straight into the reconciliation issues the Zettlr subthread is about. Hooks on the agent side are less elegant but sidestep the whole class.
Respectfully, did you use an LLM to write this comment? You're responding to flatpandas here. Having "what flatpands is pointing at..." is similar to the output of an LLM if you were to link to that comment and get a generated summary.
I wrote it. English is my second language, so I reach for "what X is pointing at" constructions a lot — partly as a self-check that I've parsed the parent correctly. If any specific claim in there looks wrong or generated, happy to have it pointed out.
Gotcha, thx for the context.
Typically we'd see the second person "you/your/you're" used and not the third person ("flatpands") here, since you (tarr1124) are directly responding to their comment, as if in conversation with them. ie: "what you're pointing at..."
Otherwise it reads like you're ignoring them and talking around them.
Yeah, fair. The third-person thing is an old habit from parsing parents before I reply, but you're right that in a direct reply it reads cold. Second person from here on.
I'm following a startup who does just that: https://www.moment.dev/docs
It's still early stage, but I love their pitch so I'm following them with fingers crossed.
the idea of being git-first it's exactly for that! so you can setup AI as a git contributor and see its changes clearly
I get the obsidian question all the time! The differences are:
- better note organization with types and relationships - different, more Notion-like UX - first class support for git as sync + version control layer - long tail of design decisions that help AI work well with vaults: types, MCP, git authorship, etc - and most of all... open source!
>open-source
And I was going to say Mac native as well, but uses Tauri. I’d love some app with the polish of Bear Notes but that just edited raw Markdown files. Ideally Obsidian with the Notebook Navigator plugin (strongly inspired by Bear Notes perhaps?) and (checks list) this very specific list of plugins that I need and should be good for everyone else thanks.
> I’d love some app with the polish of Bear Notes but that just edited raw Markdown files.
Typora? (https://typora.io/)
> I’d love some app with the polish of Bear Notes but that just edited raw Markdown files.
HelixNotes? ( https://codeberg.org/ArkHost/HelixNotes )
I had my hopes up, but looks like it has nothing to do with actual Helix.
If you want proper native for macOS, check out mdnb.app
I built it with this exact ethos, a curated set of "extended" functionality instead of a plugin system.
What plugins do you rely on in Obsidian?
Huh, somehow I had no idea that Obsidian wasn't open source. I guess I was fooled by the open source plugins.
Zettlr would like a word.
I really like Zettlr, but I find it is always crashing when markdown changes behind the scenes and it has the document open.
It's so good for viewing all markdown in a repo, but dies all too often.
Yes, but the claim is presumably that this one is good.
Exactly - cooperation is not incentivized properly
First thing curious about is opening this up on a docs/ folder in one of my projects and see how it is with that.
Great docs in the source repo.
https://github.com/refactoringhq/tolaria/tree/main/docs
Wow thanks!
Better than the one I was planning to build for myself.
Love the UI. Love the fact that the app was made with Tauri.
Nice work, will share!
Really interesting project. I like that this seems focused on organizing relationships between ideas instead of just being another notes editor. A lot of tools handle documents well, but fewer help build an actual knowledge system.
This sounds a lot like logseq that I encountered yesterday but I haven’t had a time to use them both: https://logseq.com/
Also a Markdown previewer, but in the terminal. https://github.com/RivoLink/leaf
It seemed like a nice thing at first glance, but I was quite put off to see "AI-first but not AI-only".
Why would I want to join a club where I, as a human, would be a second-class citizen?
Because ideally you would interface with all the stuff in your KB via an LLM (ideally local). The files are artifacts about knowledge and you can have super powers via an LLM. That's why, else you just use a note-taking app.
Can anyone explain how is it different to VSCode. I just don’t get it.
I open VSCode, I have files tree, mardown preview and Claude code to edit. I tried obsidian, Notion. Still don’t get it.
Hey luca, heavy obsidian user here and went through your website and github. Def will try it out. Connecting codex with Tolaria to manage your knowledgebase is something i'm looking forward to try.
I've been wanting something like that for a while. Love it, thanks.
In a similar vein, we also have Scratch [1]
[1]: https://github.com/erictli/scratch
Hey Luca this is great, trying it now. The UI is gorgeous, congratulations!
thank you so much!
I run a newsletter too, so this is cool to see! Not sure if I need it yet (my "knowledge base" is still pretty small), but I'll definitely keep it in mind for the future.
Great app! One thing I'd love to see is a mobile version — I find myself searching my notes on my phone more often than on desktop.
I could help you build IOS potentially.
great job luca! looking forward to reviewing this :) i'm a heavy obsidian user but i really like your "inbox" concept.
What about Microsoft OneNote... I did not get why we need yet another app... OneNote syncs to the cloud so I can keep my mobile and pc synced... and backed. I can paste multimedia stuff...
My use case is keeping notes, screenshots sometimes, whatever in the same format sometimes...
Wouldn't you feel limited by the markdown. What is the use case?
has strong opinions about how you should organize notes
Err, no. I'll stick to git and subdirectories, thanks.
I tried this on my Mac. Excellent concept, and the 10k notes is promising. Is there anything similar to this for Windows?
releasing it over the next couple of days
I'm glad you've built something that works for you! Keep at it. Experiment, don't just leave it the same way it is now.
you bet it!
Looks fantastic, but I've run into three bugs in about 5 minutes, including a blank, frozen app.
The app looks very slick! Just read through the docs and a couple of the Looms.
This might be a dumb question, but what are people using these MD knowledge bases for? What has this unlocked for you, that you weren't doing before?
I kind of understand the wiki use case in large code bases, with lots of changes happening, but on a personal level it's not as clear to me. Is it just another place to store ideas? Is the hope that AI resurfaces or connects relevant bits later?
This seems like a way to optimize your personal life, but I'm not sure what the end goal is.
Super impressive for a solo project! How does this compare to capacities.io ?
Very nice. Reminds me Emacs org-mode. Does it do literate programming?
A lot of people are posting their similar projects in this thread. Is there anyone making a markdown knowledge management app that feels truly Mac-native, i.e. written in AppKit or SwiftUI rather than as a web page with an Electron/Tauri/whatever wrapper?
(No offense intended to OP, this looks like a cool project; I'm just looking for something else.)
I’ve used FS Notes [1] in the past.
[1]: https://fsnot.es
Yes, check out mdnb.app
I will, thanks!
Why not obsidian?
One thing about obsidian is that it’s not open source. So if one day they change something and you don’t like it, you will be forced to use a different KB. That means to change your flows, the ux, etc. That’s a big downside from my pov (it’s good that obsidian allows you to take your files with you, but for me that’s not enough)
not gonna lie - wow the 10k notes over 6 years thing is what got me! most knowledge base tools fall apart at that scale because the organizing system becomes the job. wondering do you ever just let something be unstructured, or does everything have to be tagged in?
I thought the thing that got you was "tolaria feels like a library"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47884835
fair, i do sound like one sometimes. new here, still finding my voice, guess i haven't earned the benefit of the doubt yet from the og crowd like you
Curious how it handles 10K+ notes performance-wise, does it index everything or lazy-load?
Thank you for this. Honestly, please earn something. You should at least make it optional to buy/donate. I wanted to, couldn't.
Are you a Magic: the Gathering fan?
https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Tolaria
(Might want to check that hasbro hasn't copyrighted that)
obsidian already exists. and works on linux.
looks very good! love this
notion killer
A freaking web app?
Boo. Boooooooooo. Thanks but no thanks.
Check out mdnb.app if you want similar but truly native for macOS
At least it's Tauri!
Personally, I don’t really care which flavour of webwrapper this is. If it ain’t native, I ain’t bothering. Web pages belong in the browser, not in a browser-container pretending to be something it is not—an actual app.
Why it matters since it does the job !
Just another disposable piece of software maintained by a single person that does 80% of what other apps do but worse.
Max lifespan 2 years
Please cut this out. You really don't want to live in a world where individuals are discouraged from trying to build things that are good.
If you want something to stick around: you have to use and pay for it.
You're right. We should absolutely only rely on "Ask sales for price" closed-source software from megacorps, that get worse on every release, and get sunset anyway when the funding runs out.
I hAvE a FeW qUaLmS wItH tHiS aPp
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
But if they ever choose to decommission it, they have the chance to do the funniest thing:
https://scryfall.com/card/plst/INV-156/obliterate
unacceptable comment. hacker news is misunderstood as a toxic community because of fellas like you. have some dignity.
Of all the things to judge this on, you chose the most ridiculous one. Why shouldn’t a project like this exist just because there are “bigger” alternatives out there?
If youre gonna shut this one down, at the very least do it for the right reasons such as the fact that this is a webwrapper—absolutely disgusting, either go native or don’t bother shoving your webpage into a browser-container and calling it what it is not (an app).
Some people...
You do realize that would have once described GCC and Linux, right?
Of Linux, yes. Of GCC, no. From the very beginning there was multiple authors and the project was a mishmash of several other projects.