This made me realize that obsidian is *not* opensource, but in a way obsidian made me feel like it was opensource. Obviously now that I researched it, it is quite obvious that it is not, but still it 'feels' like it should be opensource.
The data is open and stored in markdown format. Plugins are open source. The core product is not open source, but it's also just an electron app. I've always viewed Obsidian as the inverse of an open core product.
The licence method we went with for AS Notes (https://www.asnotes.io - a wikilinks and markdown based notes / docs / blog extension for VS code) was to make the client (extension) fully opensource with a public / private cryptographic licence key model, with a couple of pro gated features. I think an opensource product is very important for a notes product, where the implications of loosing access to a tool are huge for users that invest a lot of time in a knowledge base.
To be fair, Obsidian is an Electron app with no obfuscation, so it's pretty easy to get its code. I think I even remember the official Obsidian team telling people to do that on their support forum if they distrusted the app.
Which really begs the question: why not have it open-source at that point? Obsidian isn't making money from things hidden in the code, but rather their Sync service.
Might as well open-source it (and perhaps get more people helping with the development), keep the Sync service, and stem competitor projects like these in the bud.
This is definitely it. I set it up myself with git private repos because my more-work to more-cost balance weighs heavily towards more-work. It would be trivial to fork it, set up some sync backend, and charge $4 a month to undercut them.
And honestly, they've been very good stewards of the project thus far, I'm happy with the status quo.
I suspect it's mostly about setting the expectation. They don't want to give up the control, they don't make it "free" (although it virtually is). Both are possible with open source but it would need a lot of explanation. Being closed makes it more natural.
I don't think that was my impression, but their API is pretty open for creating plugins. In support of the Obsidian model, its a dedicated engineering team, a free tool, notes are stored as .md and not something proprietary, and if you want you can pay them for their sync tool which I find both pretty reasonable and a nice way to support their efforts. Also they keep on improving the product in interesting ways, the new plugin marketplace with all of its verification policies is really nicely done, aspirational even.
But in any case, this is also a nice project, but I guess I'm also an Obsidian evangelist.
I never thought about this before, and it hasn’t been mentioned significantly in the vast amount of AI threads I read here. But it’s a really good point as skeptical as I am (in mid-2026) of AI first codebases
Simple utility stuff I believe should fit in this category. Things like a text editor.
The profit comes from elsewhere, larger more complex systems.
Of course someone can TRY to profit off a text editor, but unless it solves complex enough problems (like a full blown IDE, but even then...).
The issue is there is intense demand for it, and ALSO easy supply. If someone attempts a profit driving rugpull, another will pop up in it's place.
I am still using Dendron because it meets my needs, but I'm always half tempted to replace it, and I'm fairly confident I could come up with something that meets my own needs in a day or two, and it would likely also be valuable to countless others. I just keep assuming that someone else will spend that day or two, and my pain points with Dendron are not that bad for me to spend the time.
How many text editors have you paid for, versus how many have you used for free?
I do think there is room for a few good paid text editors in the world, but most people won't pay directly for them, though they might use them if they are bundled ala Google Docs / O365 Word.
Sure, but I would say you are an outlier in paying for those things. Most people use what's immediately available, others might search for something better that's free, and very few will go pay for something.
That last category of people are also now likely to go create something themselves with AI, but don't really want to or can't start a business from it, so they may add it to the pile of free software others can use.
Not everyone HAS to profit from their work, though I do think those who make it their passion might benefit from finding a way to do that.
Feels like a lot of apps that launch these days have an open source core app and a subscription based platform.
The subscription based platform with automatic cloud hosting and other quality of life features, whatever those are depending on the app.
Although there's a bunch of 100% open source projects and developers that get enough donations to make it their full time job just off of that. Not that it's the way to go if you want to get rich, but it's still very much a real thing.
Do you not sponsor projects that you get value out of?
I'm not saying you have to, but you asked how they get compensated and there's nothing stopping you from giving them money.
It's easy to forget that you get a lot of value out of something and not give back. If you end up getting a good paying job with your programming experience just buy your favorite projects "a beer" one a month, or once a year. God knows it's better spent there all the subscriptions we have like Netflix or Spotify. Cheaper too.
Also, if the projects are big enough you can usually get tax credit. If you work at a decently sized company they also usually do some charity matching.
Given the explosion of open source released projects I've seen over the past six months, I believe developers are getting compensated by the tool they are building for themselves creating real value for them.
I have a problem, I spend a few days building a tool that solves the problem, it works pretty well for me, and I release it to let others get value from it. They make tweaks to it, perhaps improve it, and I get value from those enhancements and bugfixes.
Congratulations on making it tonthe front page. I think your app looks like a brilliant notes app implementation, and there's obviously demand. When I launched https://www.asnotes.io earlier this year (An extension that turns VS Code in to an Obsidian like PKMS) it made the number 4 spot. It's clearly something that people see as important and draws a lot of opinions. I hope your project does well.
Why should it be opensource? Obsidian gives you complete control of your data, which it stores in an open standard.
Please explain to me why developers should act like monks who've taken a vow of poverty? The devs built something valuable, they should profit from it.
Wait, why are you mixing the two? You can have the software be under an open source license, yet still not be a monk that has taken a vow of poverty, it's not black and white.
AFAIK (as a long-term Obsidian daily user) Obsidian makes their money on various things attached to the editor/viewer itself, but don't actually charge for the editor/viewer. Even if they did, they could still slap a FOSS license on it, and continue charging for the parts they charge for today.
I'm guessing it's something else they're worried about though, rather than those things.
I agree with your very last part though, but I don't agree you cannot make it open source at the same time.
I'm mixing the two because I think developers should value their time and profit from the value they add. I want them to build viable businesses so they get wealthy from their efforts and can continue keeping useful products alive.
There's no value to their business to open sourcing the product. Open source risks losing customers to knock-off competitors or fragmenting their plugin ecoystem (which is a lot of Obsidians moat).
> I'm mixing the two because I think developers should value their time and profit from the value they add. I want them to build viable businesses so they get wealthy from their efforts and can continue keeping useful products alive.
I think exactly the same as you, but that doesn't give me the myopic view of "either you do open source or you get rich"
> There's no value to their business to open sourcing the product. Open source risks losing customers to knock-off competitors or fragmenting their plugin ecoystem (which is a lot of Obsidians moat).
You know this because you spent a whole of two minutes thinking about it?
It'd make a different bet, that Obsidian is popular today, but if they went FOSS, they'd become ubiquitous. Probably some copy-pasted competitors would appear as quickly as they'd disappear, because they're not Team Obsidian, and obviously don't know as much as Obsidian does.
But anyways, this is all speculation, I don't know for sure what would happen either, but at least I'm humble enough to know I don't know.
Reading their other comments, they are under the mistaken impression that every line of code written by a human should have a dollar sign attached to it.
No consideration given that lots of people contribute voluntarily to open-source projects or even release their projects/code for free because they enjoy writing code and engaging with the broader open source or free software community.
"Wait, why are you mixing the two? You can have the software be under an open source license, yet still not be a monk that has taken a vow of poverty, it's not black and white."
I don't think they are mixing the two. If they open sourced it, there would be immediate competition. Anyone could fork it and circumvent/compete with any premium features they might want to add to it in the future.
It's very hard to use this model to actually build a profitable company.
The only open source projects that can actually sustain themselves financially get handouts from large corporations (or are eventually purchased by them).
Well they'd just release it under a non-commercial license. The majority of their income comes from Obsidian Sync, and someone can't just host their own version of Obsidian Sync for all the Obsidian users for free. And there are already self-hosted alternatives to Obsidian Sync, in fact Obsidian even endorses them themselves[1].
As for their other paid service, Obsidian Publish, since all Obsidian notes are in plain markdown there are already many free alternatives.
So open sourcing would not harm any of those income streams. It's not about Obsidian losing profit. If you want to read the actual reasons they have decided not to open source Obsidian, they have talked about it on their forums[2]
> If they open sourced it, there would be immediate competition. Anyone could fork it and circumvent/compete with any premium features they might want to add to it in the future.
Would it? Something like Zulip seems like a way better target in that case, but Zulip seems to manage just fine with open-source code and running their own platform people can pay for.
Not saying it is easy nor not hard, I'm just saying I don't agree with "either you do open source, or you go broke" because history shows us there are more choices than that.
I think there is a special value in open source when it comes to a personal knowlege base. We invest so much time in it, and we need to know that it's not going to be taken away from us, or made unaffordable. I made https://www.asnotes.io (basically obsidian with markdown and nested wikilinking in a VS Code extension), because I wanted and thought others would want something that is a) open source and b) version control friendly so we don't even have to rely on a sync server being there in the future.
> We invest so much time in it, and we need to know that it's not going to be taken away from us
Agreed, but in the case of Obsidian, since the way they manage the data, they cannot just "take it away from us", it'll always sit where you leave it, as it's not a SaaS or a remote service. And even if the desktop client went away, all your data and notes are still available.
Otherwise I generally agree with you, all my professional and personal tooling shouldn't be able to take away agency from me, but it's worth separate the tooling from the data, as loosing the tooling sucks but loosing the data is a lot worse, at least they cannot do that.
Not saying they have to be, it's just a weird assumption that I've built up in my head. Possibly because obsidian handles sensitive data and I somewhat was under the impression it has the open-source tier scrutiny when it came to inner workings of the app.
I don't really mind Obsidian being non-FOSS, since it doesn't lock you in to any kind of propriety bullshit.
All my files are just vanilla text files. All the folders are just vanilla folders. All the attachments are just vanilla attachments. If Obsidian pissed me off, then I'd still have my notes in a fairly accessible format.
The reason is open standard. Obsidian uses markdown, that's it. No proprietary database, no fancy algorithm, no locked in platform, just a convenient way to manage your notes (jesus, that sounded like AI). You can realistically do it yourself, but they've helped you to do it for the low price of an online sync subscription.
That's why I will always hammer on open standards and federation.
AI'm building a native version[0] of Obsidian in Qt6 (QWidgets, cpp), replicating the markdown editor takes a while, there are so many ways of corrupting the file or losing the rendered markdown style... but its getting there[1] and its lightweight, using about 15mb ram, no gpu and barely uses any cpu when the cursor or scroll moves, like a text editor should be.
Still need to render widget tables, lists and syntax highlighting for code blocks for a basic modern notepad, i'm not sure about open sourcing it, seems like a waste of time nowadays but it'll be free to use.
Same here. I might want to use this. Would be interesting to AI build a way to see how phrases and ways of speaking like this spread, and track where the original idea could have originated and morphed and how networks spread like this.
I open sourced https://asnotes.io - it's markdown based with wikilinking, task management, a kanban board and static site publishing. It runs locally and is Git friendly. The aim was to build something using formats and tech that is likely to stand the test of time.
Very nice! Would you have any recommendations for the leanest compatible "host"? Instead of adding this to my VSCode, I would rather use it as a separate app. Currently, I use a naked Zed install for Markdown because it launches faster than my system apps (and than Cursor, VSCode, etc.).
I wouldn't show it as an alternative to Obsidian though. It shares MD files with it and both are supposedly about note taking ("supposedly" is for Obsidian, I haven't tried Files.md yet), but Files.md seems to have its own way of making the users work with their thoughts, notes and knowledge altogether.
When I read "an alternative", I assumed feature-parity and API compatibility. But what I found out was entirely different and much more interesting.
I'll give it a try, thanks for sharing your year-old work!
Maybe something like "self-hosted markdown notes you fully own" or "personal knowledge server"? Leans into the ownership angle instead of competing with Obsidian on features.
It’s interesting to me that it says that in some versions of second brain:
“Second brain grows, but first brain doesn’t get smarter.”
Something I remember Tiago Forte said, which turned me off of his partículas brand of a second brain, is that his goal is to “remember nothing”, and have the second brain surface exactly the context necessary at the moment, which he would proceed to read and ingest.
That sounds terrible to me :) it’s like “we don’t need to remember things if we can google them”.
I much prefer this author’s vision of using the second brain to strengthen the first brain.
Well, we know that it's impossible to remember everything. Humans are absolutely terrible at accurately recalling things that they observed even a few minutes in the past.
But we also can't remember nothing and just dump _everything_ into the second brain, otherwise we'd have no map, no context, no way to even know how to look for what we need in the moment. It would be like taking a random teenager off the street, handing them an electronics engineering textbook, and asking them to build a power supply on the spot.
So there is definitely a spectrum. Everyone seems to disagree on the optimal point on the spectrum and that is almost certainly because it varies greatly from person to person.
My personal experience has been that simply writing extremely detailed notes in the first place makes the information "sticky" in my brain, and greatly increases the likelihood that I won't even _need_ to directly reference the notes in the future. Fun little catch-22 there.
Lots of Markdown enthusiasts in the thread... if you want to sync your markdown tasks to Reminders.app please pay me some money for the privilege: https://turquoisehexagon.co.uk/remindersync
Self-plug, I'm working on one, local, native, no web based ui, and minimalist. And it has no external dependency. The data is stored as simple text file, and the format is easily searchable with *nix tools.
Not going to be open source or free though, with 2 year perpetual license. I wonder how much that would interest you? My target is people who wants todo.txt like simplicity, but few useful bits. Only for Linux and Windows for now.
This is why I built https://www.asnotes.io - It's an extension for VS Code. I needed obsidian but usable on corporate networks that don't allow Obsidian or other pkms apps. It's designed to be version control friendly so no sync server is needed either (just use Git)
Interesting. I recently "vibe-coded" my personal Obsidian clone, because I want proper Emacs keybindings, and Obsidian does not support those, not even through extensions.
I do not know what to do with my pet project. I'm using it myself, and it has tons of futures that took quite some effort to get right. For example, WYSIWYG table editing is not trivial, and Claude Opus agrees with me, in the sense that it could not manage it (at all) by itself.
Open-sourcing it is an option, but I don't look forward to negative feedback. If anyone else wants Emacs keybindings in Obsidian, I will change my mind :)
I too have vibe-coded my own personal obsidian/sublime replacement in rust, and also ran into WYSIWYG table editing and rendering issues with opus 4.7. Took a couple iterations but now formulas/rendering are perfect. GPT5.5 actually handled that very well compared to 4.7
- scriptable or extendable by lua, rendered in page, eg `${1 + 1}` outputs `2`, but you can do a lot more, such as query pages and tags with a LINQ type query interface.
I've been using TrilliumNext (fork of Trillium project that is archived) and haven't been able to find an alternative I liked more. Only thing I don't really like is that it's not really stored in Markdown and since you have the ability to have notes in multiple trees it can get a bit messy when trying to move to other systems.
I tried moving to Obsidian Notes and found myself missing Trillium. It's nice to be able to just open the web browser and have access to your own self-hosted notes with an editor anywhere. You also can set it up so if you add a sharing tag to a note you can easily share a link to the note. I believe Obsidian allows similar but only if you pay, and it's also not self-hosted.
I've tried a wiki style approach before like Tiddlywiki, but I feel like it is a whole different concept of taking and making notes that often is a bit more cumbersome, but maybe it works better with how some people think.
Gods I love and loath Tiddlywiki. It has some of the most convoluted javascript written before javascript ever actually got all the features that made javascript convoluted. But it did the job!
That markdown mirror is a pretty neat feature. I've been using Trillium for my notes and the way they save/store the notes is actually one of the things I dislike about it even though I love the application itself. I tried at one point exporting everything to markdown and it worked... but Trillium allows you to have notes in multiple places but they exist essentially as just a pointer in the backend to that note. So it made the export a bit wonky as some instances of a note are just an empty shell and don't have the actual contents. So you have to try and move notes around to get their markdown files in the right places.
I've ended up still sticking with Trilium however as I like being able to have notes in multiple locations like this.
I like the blurb about your ZK being something which can actually hold you back. I encounted the same issue myself and found that ZK is not always the best fit for me.
I find the best thing to do when studying something is to go over your material, internalize and synthesize it in an essay. If you can't create an original essay which perfectly replicates the knowledge you want to understand then you almost certainly don't understand it perfectly.
Alternatively, create a detailed flow chart using subcharts if you have to. (Graphviz/dot is good for this)
This looks awesome, and I've been waffling about moving from Notion to something local/markdown based for a while. My only issue is that I really like using "databases"/tables, specifically for moving through processes ticket-style, in Notion. Does anyone know if there's something similar elsewhere? I'm not familiar with the knowledge-base/wiki space, I just kinda fell into notion.
I use .MD files, helix terminal editor with a markdown LSP called markdown-oxide that replicates the obsidian feature set (like bidirectional links, tags, making new notes automatically, two keys get you from a in-line footnote to the definition and back again, etc), and rumdl which is a super efficient and customizable markdown linter and formatter (semantic line breaks far the win!) . Since it is all helix I can jump around a huge web of interlinked files very quickly with only a few key presses, as well as inside a document and manipulate them en masse or in minute detail all with only a few taps. All of your standard open source terminal tools work with it, difftastic, bat/cat, zoxide/CD, ripgrep, fzf, git, LLMs, encryption, sync, etc etc. I use yazi for a visual filepicker and zellij for tabs. Run it on a server and connect from any computer in the world without downloading a single thing. I sometimes make use of two tools called rucola and tree-md for looking at prettier versions of the texts and seeing stats about how they interact. All open source of course!
There is no better interface for text than a terminal, and we are in the golden age. Despite being extremely powerful, this setup will run on resource constrained machines.
Being a better version of something is an invitation, not an imposition! I'm not a developer and never have been, I study literatureand I use a modal editor for all my writing.
If you've ever used Ctrl+C to copy, you've already done something harder than the core concept of modal editing. Modal editing is simpler: you press a single key, and you switch to one (of two) modes. That's it. That's the thing people find intimidating. In one mode the letters you press show up on the screen, in the other the letters you press select/copy/move/etc (like cntrl+c... Except even simpler you only need to press one key). You have to use keyboard keys to go up and down, which I assume you already have some experience with.
Learning it is identical to learning a GUI. In Word, you hunt through menus for the word 'cut' or 'paste' and click it. In a modal editor like helix you look up cut or paste on a menu and press the key next to it instead. Except once you remember the key you never have to go look through menus again!
Get the hang of it and modal text editors are to word processors what word processors are to typewriters. Except at least typewriters have some charm.
All that being said, if you want to sync your notes you'll have to use something like Dropbox or google drive, and I looked up how to install helix and you do have to download and unzip a file (https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/releases). Still, computer science degree not required!
Unless you've only ever used android or iOS device in which case all of my assumptions about your familiarity with keyboards and mice is totally off. Still!
Heh, the author admitted that he got tired of what I'll call "curating metadata" in Obsidian, so wrote an app that handled more of it automatically.
My take: you probably don't need so much metadata!
I've spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out the perfect knowledge management app for me and honestly, I'm pretty sure I will get a lot of mileage out of something you just throw pages into, search to find it again, and ask AI to summarize/consolidate when you need it again.
Looks really slick!
I've been using Obsidian with git, and am thinking of moving back to the OG solution of simply using a text editor with a git repo. I'm wary of using cloud like google drive or dropbox for sync, especially if I'm using both phone and mobile to edit the same file throughout the day. I doubt using an external cloud really takes care of consistency and there's a possibility of losing data. Me being a developer can take the pain of a button click to git pull and resolve occasional conflicts.
To me this is fully solved solution for note taking with tools I already know and trust. Having said that, I'm gonna try Files.md for some inspiration on what I could be missing.
The plugin ecosystem is what really makes Obsidian different from the rest.
While OSS is nice, in theory it allows vibe-coding personalizations, without a clear plugin standard then every update would cause a merge headache.
And there is no lack of text editors.
The first real Obsidian alternative would allow use of existing Obsidian plugins. And I think this one thing could really make an alternative gain traction, with both users and those who contribute to the plugin ecosystem.
I’ll use obsidian until I can one shot its replacement with a local llm coding agent. And if it goes away tomorrow AND a solar flare wipes my install but somehow leaves everything else, I’ll use helix and ranger until I can one shot its replacement,… with a local llm coding agent.
I am working on something similar. I was also not aware Obsidian is not open source. Something never clicked for me with Obsidian. Will check out your code later.
My repo: https://github.com/HabermannR/Nexidion
In my case, it helps improve my ADHD-affected executive function. It lowers the barrier to entry to ingesting information into a system I know I can extract it from later. It gives me peace of mind to know I can ramble semi-coherently at the speed of conversation and know that the salient points are being captured.
Local models will continue to improve, if your concern is privacy -- already they do a decent enough job at interacting with a well-schema'd PKM
The one thing I need in a solution like this is multi-player mode that includes a simplified review/track-changes system that I can collaborate with my AI on these docs. Proof.sdk from Every Inc has an interesting approach on this. If I had more free time, I'd build it myself!
> Only necessary features, restrictions foster creativity
Interesting. Productivity tools should not force me getting creative to do the simplest things. Ideally, I can make it adapt to my workflow, not the other way around.
That's why Obsidian is as popular as it is. It starts with a foundation of features that are necessary, and then lets you add/create extensions to expand it as your creativity desires.
That line above is just an attempt to convince the user that the lack of features/extensibility is a positive thing.
That's the comment that made me check it out in more detail, as that sticks out from all the other projects that were built in a weekend in the past months.
It appeals to me as a minimalistic version of the Bear[1] notes app.
A few years ago I played around with copying the Bear app interface for the web, the idea was to create a visually identical mockup of the app so you could immediately visualise changes made when customising various theme values. I stalled with the implementation of the last part, but the rest of it is up at bear.christippett.dev
I'm really glad you mentioned this --- I've been looking for a Rust or Tauri-based Obsidian replacement for years, and this is almost everything I want (and much closer to what I want than Files.md).
Now that I'm playing with it, I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more traction on HN or Reddit.
Thank you! I am long time obsidian user looking for something that will work decently on Android and this looks promising.
I only really struggle with one basic feature - I want to be able to write note within 1-2 seconds of clicking the app icon. Obsidian makes it 10-15 seconds at best. The HelixNotes sometimes can get this in under 10, still looking for better options.
AFAICT no. It's similar to Hermes Agent and the Hermes JavaScript engine. They are two very different things. Though you could argue that both Helix projects are editors but I don't think that's meaningful in this instance.
1) Very nice implementation 2) Very nice domain! Did you always own "files.md"? 3) Re storing things on your server, what is the security layer around that?
I have been building a slightly different solution to the same problem. So far I’m pretty happy with the results and I have enough returning users that I think others are too (https://sdocs.dev/analytics).
SDocs is cli (`sdoc file.md`) -> instantly rendered Markdown file in the browser
When you install the cli it gives you the option to add a note in your base agent file (`~/.claude/CLAUDE.md`, etc.). This means every agent chat knows about SDocs and you can say “sdoc me the plan when you’re done with it” and the file will pop open instead of you having to find that terminal session to know it’s done.
Going browser first means you’re not required to install anything to get a great experience.
Despite being in the browser, the content of SDocs rendered Markdown files remain entirely local to you. SDoc urls contain your markdown document's content in compressed base64 in the url fragment (the bit after the `#`):
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.
I've enjoyed exploiting the HTML rendering side of things which is possible by displaying Markdown in a browser. I’ve added tagged code blocks that the agent is given documentation on how to use. Eg ```chart or ```mermaid (for mermaid diagrams). These then become interactive elements on the page (mermaid is best example of this currently). See live renderings of these options here - charts gallery: https://sdocs.dev/s/yO3WbxFf#k=arcDBnizla5n437VFAeiQcwlu8kh_..., diagrams gallery: https://sdocs.dev/s/B_Ux11DV#k=KsvheEkiBFai6acnoIJnrOdfVRS5u...
So you saw a product that (1) gives you complete control of your data (2) uses an open format (3) only charges for sync, publish, and commercial use, and you thought to yourself:
"What a great use of my time building a competitor that adds no value, just to save a few dollars a month on sync and publishing. I hope other people value their time as little as I do and contribute"
But Obsidian doesn't even require a few dollars a month for sync. You can use Github or whatever sync service you want. Your data is just a directory of markdown files. That said, I've paid for the sync service for years, but only because it works really well on Linux. I've always been impressed with Obsidian's first-class Linux offerings.
This made me realize that obsidian is *not* opensource, but in a way obsidian made me feel like it was opensource. Obviously now that I researched it, it is quite obvious that it is not, but still it 'feels' like it should be opensource.
The data is open and stored in markdown format. Plugins are open source. The core product is not open source, but it's also just an electron app. I've always viewed Obsidian as the inverse of an open core product.
The licence method we went with for AS Notes (https://www.asnotes.io - a wikilinks and markdown based notes / docs / blog extension for VS code) was to make the client (extension) fully opensource with a public / private cryptographic licence key model, with a couple of pro gated features. I think an opensource product is very important for a notes product, where the implications of loosing access to a tool are huge for users that invest a lot of time in a knowledge base.
> I've always viewed Obsidian as the inverse of an open core product.
I'd like to hereby propose the "open shell" development model.
To be fair, Obsidian is an Electron app with no obfuscation, so it's pretty easy to get its code. I think I even remember the official Obsidian team telling people to do that on their support forum if they distrusted the app.
Which really begs the question: why not have it open-source at that point? Obsidian isn't making money from things hidden in the code, but rather their Sync service.
Might as well open-source it (and perhaps get more people helping with the development), keep the Sync service, and stem competitor projects like these in the bud.
Because then someone might fork it into a new product with their own sync service.
This is definitely it. I set it up myself with git private repos because my more-work to more-cost balance weighs heavily towards more-work. It would be trivial to fork it, set up some sync backend, and charge $4 a month to undercut them.
And honestly, they've been very good stewards of the project thus far, I'm happy with the status quo.
I suspect it's mostly about setting the expectation. They don't want to give up the control, they don't make it "free" (although it virtually is). Both are possible with open source but it would need a lot of explanation. Being closed makes it more natural.
I don't think that was my impression, but their API is pretty open for creating plugins. In support of the Obsidian model, its a dedicated engineering team, a free tool, notes are stored as .md and not something proprietary, and if you want you can pay them for their sync tool which I find both pretty reasonable and a nice way to support their efforts. Also they keep on improving the product in interesting ways, the new plugin marketplace with all of its verification policies is really nicely done, aspirational even.
But in any case, this is also a nice project, but I guess I'm also an Obsidian evangelist.
That was the reason a few years ago I started this project.
It seems like software in AI-era should be distributed open source.
So that anyone could tweak it however he wants. Not though clunky plugins system.
> So that anyone could tweak it however he wants.
That was true before the "AI era" as well.
Well, yes.
Just now, any regular user can clone the repository and ask an LLM to tune it to his needs.
I never thought about this before, and it hasn’t been mentioned significantly in the vast amount of AI threads I read here. But it’s a really good point as skeptical as I am (in mid-2026) of AI first codebases
And the developers get compensated for their work how?
Not all software needs to be for-profit.
Simple utility stuff I believe should fit in this category. Things like a text editor.
The profit comes from elsewhere, larger more complex systems.
Of course someone can TRY to profit off a text editor, but unless it solves complex enough problems (like a full blown IDE, but even then...).
The issue is there is intense demand for it, and ALSO easy supply. If someone attempts a profit driving rugpull, another will pop up in it's place.
I am still using Dendron because it meets my needs, but I'm always half tempted to replace it, and I'm fairly confident I could come up with something that meets my own needs in a day or two, and it would likely also be valuable to countless others. I just keep assuming that someone else will spend that day or two, and my pain points with Dendron are not that bad for me to spend the time.
A text editor with good UX is quite complex, I think it's hard to argue otherwise.
Most text-editors by large corporations don't even pass this bar.
How many text editors have you paid for, versus how many have you used for free?
I do think there is room for a few good paid text editors in the world, but most people won't pay directly for them, though they might use them if they are bundled ala Google Docs / O365 Word.
I have paid for Obsidian and Samsung Notes as part of buying a Samsung phone.
I also paid for a few more, e.g. Notion, but I think it's better to focus on: There's definitely value in good text editors.
They can greatly enhance your experience with a system, e.g. if Samsung Notes was amazing I'd be much more likely to stick to using a Samsung phone.
Sure, but I would say you are an outlier in paying for those things. Most people use what's immediately available, others might search for something better that's free, and very few will go pay for something.
That last category of people are also now likely to go create something themselves with AI, but don't really want to or can't start a business from it, so they may add it to the pile of free software others can use.
Not everyone HAS to profit from their work, though I do think those who make it their passion might benefit from finding a way to do that.
Feels like a lot of apps that launch these days have an open source core app and a subscription based platform.
The subscription based platform with automatic cloud hosting and other quality of life features, whatever those are depending on the app.
Although there's a bunch of 100% open source projects and developers that get enough donations to make it their full time job just off of that. Not that it's the way to go if you want to get rich, but it's still very much a real thing.
Do you not sponsor projects that you get value out of?
I'm not saying you have to, but you asked how they get compensated and there's nothing stopping you from giving them money.
It's easy to forget that you get a lot of value out of something and not give back. If you end up getting a good paying job with your programming experience just buy your favorite projects "a beer" one a month, or once a year. God knows it's better spent there all the subscriptions we have like Netflix or Spotify. Cheaper too.
Also, if the projects are big enough you can usually get tax credit. If you work at a decently sized company they also usually do some charity matching.
Donationware is a viable business model for basically nobody.
Most people won't pay for something if they don't have to.
That's yet to be decided :D
For the first time, I put a sponsorship button. Will see if it works.
Given the explosion of open source released projects I've seen over the past six months, I believe developers are getting compensated by the tool they are building for themselves creating real value for them.
I have a problem, I spend a few days building a tool that solves the problem, it works pretty well for me, and I release it to let others get value from it. They make tweaks to it, perhaps improve it, and I get value from those enhancements and bugfixes.
Obsidian has a number of full time employees who all want to eat and afford rent
> Obsidian has a number of full time employees who all want to eat and afford rent
They have lots of sponsors [1]; you can pay $4/month for sync service or $50 a year, per person for a commercial license.
[1]: https://obsidian.md/enterprise/
The burden of OSS is dealing with PRs that you don't want to merge. The drive by bug fixes don't compensate for that.
There is no obligation to maintain, no obligation to merge. Copyright is just that, copy right, it’s not an entitlement.
Free as in beer and free as in speech means those ‘contributors’ are also free as in Linus to go fork themselves.
Don’t like it? Go fork, yourself. Want it different? Pay, money, make, it, happen. Don’t like paying? Go fork, yourself, harder.
Are you asking how the open source ecosystem works in general?
In my experience, if the dev wishes to be compensated in dollars, they also sell a commercial license, cloud services, etc.
I don’t mean to be condescending but it feels like if this were an important question it would have halted OSS development decades ago.
The same way they do now?
get a job
Congratulations on making it tonthe front page. I think your app looks like a brilliant notes app implementation, and there's obviously demand. When I launched https://www.asnotes.io earlier this year (An extension that turns VS Code in to an Obsidian like PKMS) it made the number 4 spot. It's clearly something that people see as important and draws a lot of opinions. I hope your project does well.
> It seems like software in AI-era should be distributed open source.
That makes it easy for AI to be trained on it.
Yeah, also makes it easy for humans to train on it.
That's the point of open source, sharing the knowledge.
We'll all make the same shit over and over if noone shares.
But if we all share, then the only thing left to make is the unknown.
Good.
Why should it be opensource? Obsidian gives you complete control of your data, which it stores in an open standard.
Please explain to me why developers should act like monks who've taken a vow of poverty? The devs built something valuable, they should profit from it.
Wait, why are you mixing the two? You can have the software be under an open source license, yet still not be a monk that has taken a vow of poverty, it's not black and white.
AFAIK (as a long-term Obsidian daily user) Obsidian makes their money on various things attached to the editor/viewer itself, but don't actually charge for the editor/viewer. Even if they did, they could still slap a FOSS license on it, and continue charging for the parts they charge for today.
I'm guessing it's something else they're worried about though, rather than those things.
I agree with your very last part though, but I don't agree you cannot make it open source at the same time.
I'm mixing the two because I think developers should value their time and profit from the value they add. I want them to build viable businesses so they get wealthy from their efforts and can continue keeping useful products alive.
There's no value to their business to open sourcing the product. Open source risks losing customers to knock-off competitors or fragmenting their plugin ecoystem (which is a lot of Obsidians moat).
> I'm mixing the two because I think developers should value their time and profit from the value they add. I want them to build viable businesses so they get wealthy from their efforts and can continue keeping useful products alive.
I think exactly the same as you, but that doesn't give me the myopic view of "either you do open source or you get rich"
> There's no value to their business to open sourcing the product. Open source risks losing customers to knock-off competitors or fragmenting their plugin ecoystem (which is a lot of Obsidians moat).
You know this because you spent a whole of two minutes thinking about it?
It'd make a different bet, that Obsidian is popular today, but if they went FOSS, they'd become ubiquitous. Probably some copy-pasted competitors would appear as quickly as they'd disappear, because they're not Team Obsidian, and obviously don't know as much as Obsidian does.
But anyways, this is all speculation, I don't know for sure what would happen either, but at least I'm humble enough to know I don't know.
Reading their other comments, they are under the mistaken impression that every line of code written by a human should have a dollar sign attached to it.
No consideration given that lots of people contribute voluntarily to open-source projects or even release their projects/code for free because they enjoy writing code and engaging with the broader open source or free software community.
"Wait, why are you mixing the two? You can have the software be under an open source license, yet still not be a monk that has taken a vow of poverty, it's not black and white."
I don't think they are mixing the two. If they open sourced it, there would be immediate competition. Anyone could fork it and circumvent/compete with any premium features they might want to add to it in the future.
It's very hard to use this model to actually build a profitable company.
The only open source projects that can actually sustain themselves financially get handouts from large corporations (or are eventually purchased by them).
Well they'd just release it under a non-commercial license. The majority of their income comes from Obsidian Sync, and someone can't just host their own version of Obsidian Sync for all the Obsidian users for free. And there are already self-hosted alternatives to Obsidian Sync, in fact Obsidian even endorses them themselves[1].
As for their other paid service, Obsidian Publish, since all Obsidian notes are in plain markdown there are already many free alternatives.
So open sourcing would not harm any of those income streams. It's not about Obsidian losing profit. If you want to read the actual reasons they have decided not to open source Obsidian, they have talked about it on their forums[2]
[1] https://obsidian.md/help/sync-notes [2] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/1...
> If they open sourced it, there would be immediate competition. Anyone could fork it and circumvent/compete with any premium features they might want to add to it in the future.
Would it? Something like Zulip seems like a way better target in that case, but Zulip seems to manage just fine with open-source code and running their own platform people can pay for.
Not saying it is easy nor not hard, I'm just saying I don't agree with "either you do open source, or you go broke" because history shows us there are more choices than that.
> explain to me why developers should act like monks who've taken a vow of poverty? The devs built something valuable, they should profit from it.
No, don't bully others into a fake argument about your weird fantasies.
They never said that developers should be poor. That's also incorrect. Please don't pull others into this kind of toxic discussions.
I think there is a special value in open source when it comes to a personal knowlege base. We invest so much time in it, and we need to know that it's not going to be taken away from us, or made unaffordable. I made https://www.asnotes.io (basically obsidian with markdown and nested wikilinking in a VS Code extension), because I wanted and thought others would want something that is a) open source and b) version control friendly so we don't even have to rely on a sync server being there in the future.
> We invest so much time in it, and we need to know that it's not going to be taken away from us
Agreed, but in the case of Obsidian, since the way they manage the data, they cannot just "take it away from us", it'll always sit where you leave it, as it's not a SaaS or a remote service. And even if the desktop client went away, all your data and notes are still available.
Otherwise I generally agree with you, all my professional and personal tooling shouldn't be able to take away agency from me, but it's worth separate the tooling from the data, as loosing the tooling sucks but loosing the data is a lot worse, at least they cannot do that.
Agree wholeheartedly, but you already have that with Obsidian. You own the vault, and if you don't want obsidian, its already in markdown.
Not saying they have to be, it's just a weird assumption that I've built up in my head. Possibly because obsidian handles sensitive data and I somewhat was under the impression it has the open-source tier scrutiny when it came to inner workings of the app.
It's a personal bias for me.
Perception of quality, because the author is under constant review.
Did GP edit the post? Please explain to me where they stated that developers should act like monks who’ve taken a vow of poverty?
I completely agree with the sentiment of your reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48181203 btw
Not everyone feels comfortable running third-party opaque code in their computers.
I don't really mind Obsidian being non-FOSS, since it doesn't lock you in to any kind of propriety bullshit.
All my files are just vanilla text files. All the folders are just vanilla folders. All the attachments are just vanilla attachments. If Obsidian pissed me off, then I'd still have my notes in a fairly accessible format.
I had absolutely no idea either, I had just assumed that it was, which was a dumb assumption to make. Thanks for pointing it out!
The reason is open standard. Obsidian uses markdown, that's it. No proprietary database, no fancy algorithm, no locked in platform, just a convenient way to manage your notes (jesus, that sounded like AI). You can realistically do it yourself, but they've helped you to do it for the low price of an online sync subscription.
That's why I will always hammer on open standards and federation.
I always just assumed!
AI'm building a native version[0] of Obsidian in Qt6 (QWidgets, cpp), replicating the markdown editor takes a while, there are so many ways of corrupting the file or losing the rendered markdown style... but its getting there[1] and its lightweight, using about 15mb ram, no gpu and barely uses any cpu when the cursor or scroll moves, like a text editor should be.
Still need to render widget tables, lists and syntax highlighting for code blocks for a basic modern notepad, i'm not sure about open sourcing it, seems like a waste of time nowadays but it'll be free to use.
[0]: https://i.imgur.com/ro9Zq9w.png [1]: https://i.imgur.com/pbJcTQF.gif
If AI’m building isn’t a typo, I kinda like it as a way to accurately claim what I’m building with AI.
You AI't wrong, just a wordplay to inform about the help of AI.
You’re AIright
It’s either this or using the “royal we” when we talk about the code “we” wrote together.
Same here. I might want to use this. Would be interesting to AI build a way to see how phrases and ways of speaking like this spread, and track where the original idea could have originated and morphed and how networks spread like this.
I open sourced https://asnotes.io - it's markdown based with wikilinking, task management, a kanban board and static site publishing. It runs locally and is Git friendly. The aim was to build something using formats and tech that is likely to stand the test of time.
Very nice! Would you have any recommendations for the leanest compatible "host"? Instead of adding this to my VSCode, I would rather use it as a separate app. Currently, I use a naked Zed install for Markdown because it launches faster than my system apps (and than Cursor, VSCode, etc.).
Wow this looks amazing. The extended demo really looks incredible.
A term is born
Will it be Free software?
If you're building something that's Free software, fully compatible with Obsidian, and a native app, AI'm willing to contribute tokens.
I wouldn't show it as an alternative to Obsidian though. It shares MD files with it and both are supposedly about note taking ("supposedly" is for Obsidian, I haven't tried Files.md yet), but Files.md seems to have its own way of making the users work with their thoughts, notes and knowledge altogether.
When I read "an alternative", I assumed feature-parity and API compatibility. But what I found out was entirely different and much more interesting.
I'll give it a try, thanks for sharing your year-old work!
> When I read "an alternative", I assumed feature-parity and API compatibility. But what I found out was entirely different and much more interesting.
Thanks for a good observation! Indeed, I don't position it as Obsidian alternative. I don't know a better pitch for it just yet.
For me that's something about: simplicity, lazy flow of adding things, readiness to use out of the box.
To focus on what works, and not what is fancy.
I would say "open source markdown knowledge-base similar to Obsidian" but I'm not a marketing guy
Maybe something like "self-hosted markdown notes you fully own" or "personal knowledge server"? Leans into the ownership angle instead of competing with Obsidian on features.
Well, that sounds great, actually.
> When I read "an alternative", I assumed feature-parity and API compatibility
When I read “alternative” I immediately had a rant in my head about people calling things alternatives that are not.
This is great. I build a Ai status page [1] based around MD files and included obsidian as option. Will look to support this as well.
[1]: https://github.com/jwillmer/ai-status
It’s interesting to me that it says that in some versions of second brain:
“Second brain grows, but first brain doesn’t get smarter.”
Something I remember Tiago Forte said, which turned me off of his partículas brand of a second brain, is that his goal is to “remember nothing”, and have the second brain surface exactly the context necessary at the moment, which he would proceed to read and ingest.
That sounds terrible to me :) it’s like “we don’t need to remember things if we can google them”.
I much prefer this author’s vision of using the second brain to strengthen the first brain.
Well, we know that it's impossible to remember everything. Humans are absolutely terrible at accurately recalling things that they observed even a few minutes in the past.
But we also can't remember nothing and just dump _everything_ into the second brain, otherwise we'd have no map, no context, no way to even know how to look for what we need in the moment. It would be like taking a random teenager off the street, handing them an electronics engineering textbook, and asking them to build a power supply on the spot.
So there is definitely a spectrum. Everyone seems to disagree on the optimal point on the spectrum and that is almost certainly because it varies greatly from person to person.
My personal experience has been that simply writing extremely detailed notes in the first place makes the information "sticky" in my brain, and greatly increases the likelihood that I won't even _need_ to directly reference the notes in the future. Fun little catch-22 there.
Thanks!
I've been growing my knowledge base for many years, with great results.
And you really need all that much to start taking notes.
No techniques, no workflows, just the the simplest setup would do.
"Second Brain", however, brings excitement to people's minds.
But in reality it just doesn't work. It makes great sales, though.
I believe that not only you should own your data in plain files, but also you should own the software that opens those files.
So that your files and tools can grow together, fully under your ownership, through the ages.
The app can be easily tweaked for your own needs via an LLM - code is optimized for that.
P.S. And Golang seems to be great fit for this kind of software.
What makes Golang a great fit in your opinion?
Server setup before the rewrite:
docker + php-fpm + php7 + larvel + nginx + redis + cron + worker + certbot
Server after the rewrite to Golang:
server, a 15MB no-dependencies binary that has everything.
That's brilliant. Can't beat the convenience of a single-file executable!
That is a pretty strong argument for Go!
Since I plan to use it for the rest of my life, I need the code and infrastructure to be radically simple and easy to maintain.
Like, I should be able to open it even after a few years, and do some fixes or add some features.
Go's ecosystem seems to share this mindset.
You might like what I made for myself https://github.com/pratikdeoghare/brashtag
Lots of Markdown enthusiasts in the thread... if you want to sync your markdown tasks to Reminders.app please pay me some money for the privilege: https://turquoisehexagon.co.uk/remindersync
or just vibe your own solution :)
This is neat, but I need a non-server-side program for this. I want everything local and running for the next 20+ years.
You can just clone and use offline.
Just open web/index.html file, it absolutely requires no server.
If you want a local server though, it is easy to setup: https://github.com/zakirullin/files.md/blob/main/docs/your-o...
Self-plug, I'm working on one, local, native, no web based ui, and minimalist. And it has no external dependency. The data is stored as simple text file, and the format is easily searchable with *nix tools.
Not going to be open source or free though, with 2 year perpetual license. I wonder how much that would interest you? My target is people who wants todo.txt like simplicity, but few useful bits. Only for Linux and Windows for now.
This is why I built https://www.asnotes.io - It's an extension for VS Code. I needed obsidian but usable on corporate networks that don't allow Obsidian or other pkms apps. It's designed to be version control friendly so no sync server is needed either (just use Git)
TiddlyWiki?
https://tiddlywiki.com/
Which has been around for 22 years now!
Interesting. I recently "vibe-coded" my personal Obsidian clone, because I want proper Emacs keybindings, and Obsidian does not support those, not even through extensions.
I do not know what to do with my pet project. I'm using it myself, and it has tons of futures that took quite some effort to get right. For example, WYSIWYG table editing is not trivial, and Claude Opus agrees with me, in the sense that it could not manage it (at all) by itself.
Open-sourcing it is an option, but I don't look forward to negative feedback. If anyone else wants Emacs keybindings in Obsidian, I will change my mind :)
I too have vibe-coded my own personal obsidian/sublime replacement in rust, and also ran into WYSIWYG table editing and rendering issues with opus 4.7. Took a couple iterations but now formulas/rendering are perfect. GPT5.5 actually handled that very well compared to 4.7
Same idea, but directly inside your terminal: https://github.com/RivoLink/leaf
This is perfect! thanks for sharing it
Glad it helped you.
Nice project. People may also want to checkout Tiddlywiki.
I ended up landing on https://silverbullet.md. It checks a lot of boxes for me,
- self hosted
- works offline (mostly)
- "just md" BUT
- scriptable or extendable by lua, rendered in page, eg `${1 + 1}` outputs `2`, but you can do a lot more, such as query pages and tags with a LINQ type query interface.
I've been using TrilliumNext (fork of Trillium project that is archived) and haven't been able to find an alternative I liked more. Only thing I don't really like is that it's not really stored in Markdown and since you have the ability to have notes in multiple trees it can get a bit messy when trying to move to other systems.
I tried moving to Obsidian Notes and found myself missing Trillium. It's nice to be able to just open the web browser and have access to your own self-hosted notes with an editor anywhere. You also can set it up so if you add a sharing tag to a note you can easily share a link to the note. I believe Obsidian allows similar but only if you pay, and it's also not self-hosted.
I've tried a wiki style approach before like Tiddlywiki, but I feel like it is a whole different concept of taking and making notes that often is a bit more cumbersome, but maybe it works better with how some people think.
> People may also want to checkout Tiddlywiki.
Also Zettlr
> Tiddlywiki
Love Tiddlywiki. It's amazing the amount of functionality it has, even if you use it in "one html file" mode. Great for making a web garden [1].
[1]: https://nesslabs.com/digital-garden-tiddlywiki
Gods I love and loath Tiddlywiki. It has some of the most convoluted javascript written before javascript ever actually got all the features that made javascript convoluted. But it did the job!
To edit Markdown files I want a nice simple native app.
We had those already more than a decade ago. Personally, I fondly remember Mou.
Obsidian has heavy Electron vibes, and Files.md is several steps more into the wrong direction.
The name is also bad. It feels like it was chosen because someone already had the domain.
Scope out minimal.app (or minimal.app/#beta for anyone who wants to contribute to the roadmap). Opinionated, native-only, extremely focused.
Or just use LogSeq https://discuss.logseq.com/t/whats-new-with-logseq-db-may-16...
That markdown mirror is a pretty neat feature. I've been using Trillium for my notes and the way they save/store the notes is actually one of the things I dislike about it even though I love the application itself. I tried at one point exporting everything to markdown and it worked... but Trillium allows you to have notes in multiple places but they exist essentially as just a pointer in the backend to that note. So it made the export a bit wonky as some instances of a note are just an empty shell and don't have the actual contents. So you have to try and move notes around to get their markdown files in the right places.
I've ended up still sticking with Trilium however as I like being able to have notes in multiple locations like this.
The '... building this for 5 years' definitely resonates. Text editors are a pitfall of hidden complexities!
It looks and feels great, congratulations for getting this out.
Not very classy to piggy back off of this post to advertise your own text editor. Just make a new "Show HN" post.
You are right, I removed it.
I like the blurb about your ZK being something which can actually hold you back. I encounted the same issue myself and found that ZK is not always the best fit for me.
I find the best thing to do when studying something is to go over your material, internalize and synthesize it in an essay. If you can't create an original essay which perfectly replicates the knowledge you want to understand then you almost certainly don't understand it perfectly.
Alternatively, create a detailed flow chart using subcharts if you have to. (Graphviz/dot is good for this)
This looks awesome, and I've been waffling about moving from Notion to something local/markdown based for a while. My only issue is that I really like using "databases"/tables, specifically for moving through processes ticket-style, in Notion. Does anyone know if there's something similar elsewhere? I'm not familiar with the knowledge-base/wiki space, I just kinda fell into notion.
> waffling about moving from Notion to something local/markdown based for a while.
Check out Tolaria [1]. Open source, works locally, uses markdown, no-databases. Git client built-in. Even has Notion-style input.
[1]: https://tolaria.md
This looks REALLY good, thanks.
I use .MD files, helix terminal editor with a markdown LSP called markdown-oxide that replicates the obsidian feature set (like bidirectional links, tags, making new notes automatically, two keys get you from a in-line footnote to the definition and back again, etc), and rumdl which is a super efficient and customizable markdown linter and formatter (semantic line breaks far the win!) . Since it is all helix I can jump around a huge web of interlinked files very quickly with only a few key presses, as well as inside a document and manipulate them en masse or in minute detail all with only a few taps. All of your standard open source terminal tools work with it, difftastic, bat/cat, zoxide/CD, ripgrep, fzf, git, LLMs, encryption, sync, etc etc. I use yazi for a visual filepicker and zellij for tabs. Run it on a server and connect from any computer in the world without downloading a single thing. I sometimes make use of two tools called rucola and tree-md for looking at prettier versions of the texts and seeing stats about how they interact. All open source of course!
There is no better interface for text than a terminal, and we are in the golden age. Despite being extremely powerful, this setup will run on resource constrained machines.
> There is no better interface for text than a terminal
It's a personal choice that cannot be imposed on everyone. Not everyone is a developer.
Being a better version of something is an invitation, not an imposition! I'm not a developer and never have been, I study literatureand I use a modal editor for all my writing.
If you've ever used Ctrl+C to copy, you've already done something harder than the core concept of modal editing. Modal editing is simpler: you press a single key, and you switch to one (of two) modes. That's it. That's the thing people find intimidating. In one mode the letters you press show up on the screen, in the other the letters you press select/copy/move/etc (like cntrl+c... Except even simpler you only need to press one key). You have to use keyboard keys to go up and down, which I assume you already have some experience with.
Learning it is identical to learning a GUI. In Word, you hunt through menus for the word 'cut' or 'paste' and click it. In a modal editor like helix you look up cut or paste on a menu and press the key next to it instead. Except once you remember the key you never have to go look through menus again!
Get the hang of it and modal text editors are to word processors what word processors are to typewriters. Except at least typewriters have some charm.
All that being said, if you want to sync your notes you'll have to use something like Dropbox or google drive, and I looked up how to install helix and you do have to download and unzip a file (https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/releases). Still, computer science degree not required!
Unless you've only ever used android or iOS device in which case all of my assumptions about your familiarity with keyboards and mice is totally off. Still!
So, I suggest you https://github.com/RivoLink/leaf
Right, but most people want to be able to consult their notes on the go, quickly add items from their phone, etc.
Heh, the author admitted that he got tired of what I'll call "curating metadata" in Obsidian, so wrote an app that handled more of it automatically.
My take: you probably don't need so much metadata!
I've spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out the perfect knowledge management app for me and honestly, I'm pretty sure I will get a lot of mileage out of something you just throw pages into, search to find it again, and ask AI to summarize/consolidate when you need it again.
Is there a way to follow inline links from a mobile device? Doesn’t seem to work for me in mobile Safari.
It is not very well tested on mobiles yet.
People use chatbot on the mobiles - way more convenient.
You can both read/write notes through the chat.
Looks really slick! I've been using Obsidian with git, and am thinking of moving back to the OG solution of simply using a text editor with a git repo. I'm wary of using cloud like google drive or dropbox for sync, especially if I'm using both phone and mobile to edit the same file throughout the day. I doubt using an external cloud really takes care of consistency and there's a possibility of losing data. Me being a developer can take the pain of a button click to git pull and resolve occasional conflicts. To me this is fully solved solution for note taking with tools I already know and trust. Having said that, I'm gonna try Files.md for some inspiration on what I could be missing.
Thanks for your warm words!
> I'm gonna try Files.md for some inspiration on what I could be missing
For the most part I was thinking more about what I can remove :D
This inspires me. What kind of minimal feature set does one need to improve his thinking...
There's also https://logseq.com/
The plugin ecosystem is what really makes Obsidian different from the rest.
While OSS is nice, in theory it allows vibe-coding personalizations, without a clear plugin standard then every update would cause a merge headache.
And there is no lack of text editors.
The first real Obsidian alternative would allow use of existing Obsidian plugins. And I think this one thing could really make an alternative gain traction, with both users and those who contribute to the plugin ecosystem.
Let us know when this isn't a Chrome-specific tool.
I'm missing export in https://textbundle.org/ format.
"TextBundle brings convenience back - by bundling the Markdown text and all referenced images into a single file."
If you want to bundle your images in markdown why don't you just use an HTML section with the image encoded as base64 data?
I’ll use obsidian until I can one shot its replacement with a local llm coding agent. And if it goes away tomorrow AND a solar flare wipes my install but somehow leaves everything else, I’ll use helix and ranger until I can one shot its replacement,… with a local llm coding agent.
I am working on something similar. I was also not aware Obsidian is not open source. Something never clicked for me with Obsidian. Will check out your code later. My repo: https://github.com/HabermannR/Nexidion
Thank you for actually acquiring the .md domain corresponding to your software and avoiding some security holesof the future :)
I bought this domain with the promise that one day I'll release my pet-project.
So did I, 3 years later :)
Why will I want to feed my life into LLM
In my case, it helps improve my ADHD-affected executive function. It lowers the barrier to entry to ingesting information into a system I know I can extract it from later. It gives me peace of mind to know I can ramble semi-coherently at the speed of conversation and know that the salient points are being captured.
Local models will continue to improve, if your concern is privacy -- already they do a decent enough job at interacting with a well-schema'd PKM
The one thing I need in a solution like this is multi-player mode that includes a simplified review/track-changes system that I can collaborate with my AI on these docs. Proof.sdk from Every Inc has an interesting approach on this. If I had more free time, I'd build it myself!
My note taking endgame is a plain dir with md files and a simple website that gives you fullscreen textarea to view and edit them.
> Only necessary features, restrictions foster creativity
Interesting. Productivity tools should not force me getting creative to do the simplest things. Ideally, I can make it adapt to my workflow, not the other way around.
That's why Obsidian is as popular as it is. It starts with a foundation of features that are necessary, and then lets you add/create extensions to expand it as your creativity desires.
That line above is just an attempt to convince the user that the lack of features/extensibility is a positive thing.
Markdown-first tools always end up reinventing each other.
Post it again when it works in Firefox.
Once they'll support Local FileSystem API!
A docker release would be great. Looks like a more modern version of ManyNotes.
Hm. I thought that there's one single binary + one script to deploy, so Docker is not needed...
Looks nice! Doesn't work in Safari though, which is a non-starter for me.
In Safari it should work in OPFS.
Because Safari still doesn't support Local FileSystem API :(
Only works in Chrome!
You can use any browser.
But Local File System API has limited support in other browsers.
Looks nice but seems overkill to me to run a Go server to sync with a telegram bot to authenticate. Maybe I don't fully understand the use case.
I want something like this, but completely terminal based
Maybe leaf : https://github.com/RivoLink/leaf
nvim + markdown oxide is the closest I've found https://github.com/Feel-ix-343/markdown-oxide
I really like the look and feel!
Thanks a lot! I've been perfecting things for 5 years. A week ago I decided to open source it finally :)
That's the comment that made me check it out in more detail, as that sticks out from all the other projects that were built in a weekend in the past months.
Thanks! There's a lot to it, and for years me and my friends were using the project.
A lot of us built knowledge bases, and we enjoyed it all quite a bit.
are you still using the project?
Sure.
I can't live without it :)
Notes, journal, tasks, projects - everything is in there.
Whenever I have a new machine, first thing I do - I open the app =)
All the friends that started years ago also use the app to this very day.
This is neat. I dont get how sync works. Is it server side? Or is there some client side oauth flow? I dont see it.
It appeals to me as a minimalistic version of the Bear[1] notes app.
A few years ago I played around with copying the Bear app interface for the web, the idea was to create a visually identical mockup of the app so you could immediately visualise changes made when customising various theme values. I stalled with the implementation of the last part, but the rest of it is up at bear.christippett.dev
[1] https://bear.app
Nice Project, I really like the look!
Thanks! I am glad you enjoyed it. For the past week alone, I made 500+ commits, fixing all sorts of UI/UX fixes to perfect things out.
I believe I put too much time into it during all those years, but I don't regret it. Because I use the project on daily basis.
nice, going to point my hermes agent to this instead of obsidian
I love the simplicity.
Thanks! That's what I was striving for :)
Simplicity started from the domain name.
another one in the same space: https://helixnotes.com/
I'm really glad you mentioned this --- I've been looking for a Rust or Tauri-based Obsidian replacement for years, and this is almost everything I want (and much closer to what I want than Files.md).
Now that I'm playing with it, I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more traction on HN or Reddit.
Thank you! I am long time obsidian user looking for something that will work decently on Android and this looks promising.
I only really struggle with one basic feature - I want to be able to write note within 1-2 seconds of clicking the app icon. Obsidian makes it 10-15 seconds at best. The HelixNotes sometimes can get this in under 10, still looking for better options.
Is this related to https://helix-editor.com/ ??
AFAICT no. It's similar to Hermes Agent and the Hermes JavaScript engine. They are two very different things. Though you could argue that both Helix projects are editors but I don't think that's meaningful in this instance.
Big fan of the note up front about how long they’ve been working on it, feel like we’ll be seeing a lot more of that as an anti-slop signal
Thanks. Even though there's "LICENSE.md 3 years ago" file, today I also added this text :)
This is hand crafted, for the most part.
1) Very nice implementation 2) Very nice domain! Did you always own "files.md"? 3) Re storing things on your server, what is the security layer around that?
I have been building a slightly different solution to the same problem. So far I’m pretty happy with the results and I have enough returning users that I think others are too (https://sdocs.dev/analytics).
I’ve built SmallDocs (https://sdocs.dev; Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633).
SDocs is cli (`sdoc file.md`) -> instantly rendered Markdown file in the browser
When you install the cli it gives you the option to add a note in your base agent file (`~/.claude/CLAUDE.md`, etc.). This means every agent chat knows about SDocs and you can say “sdoc me the plan when you’re done with it” and the file will pop open instead of you having to find that terminal session to know it’s done.
Going browser first means you’re not required to install anything to get a great experience.
Despite being in the browser, the content of SDocs rendered Markdown files remain entirely 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)...
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.
I've enjoyed exploiting the HTML rendering side of things which is possible by displaying Markdown in a browser. I’ve added tagged code blocks that the agent is given documentation on how to use. Eg ```chart or ```mermaid (for mermaid diagrams). These then become interactive elements on the page (mermaid is best example of this currently). See live renderings of these options here - charts gallery: https://sdocs.dev/s/yO3WbxFf#k=arcDBnizla5n437VFAeiQcwlu8kh_..., diagrams gallery: https://sdocs.dev/s/B_Ux11DV#k=KsvheEkiBFai6acnoIJnrOdfVRS5u...
> Very nice domain! Did you always own "files.md"?
Thanks! I bought it about 3 years ago. Back then, the project was just a chatbot.
But already back then, I kind of had an idea where I want it all to go.
I wanted the simplicity (and 0 cognitive load!) to start right from the domain name! Files in .md - files.md!
> Re storing things on your server, what is the security layer around that?
For the most part I use the project from my Telegram bot. And due to that, it is not possible to do proper E2E.
Will see if people use the chatbot, if not, we can consider E2E.
So you saw a product that (1) gives you complete control of your data (2) uses an open format (3) only charges for sync, publish, and commercial use, and you thought to yourself:
"What a great use of my time building a competitor that adds no value, just to save a few dollars a month on sync and publishing. I hope other people value their time as little as I do and contribute"
Have fun!
But Obsidian doesn't even require a few dollars a month for sync. You can use Github or whatever sync service you want. Your data is just a directory of markdown files. That said, I've paid for the sync service for years, but only because it works really well on Linux. I've always been impressed with Obsidian's first-class Linux offerings.
it's nice to have open source implementations so you can extend / borrow / merge / morph features and ideas into something else