I'd like to hereby propose the "open shell" development model.
[caveat: it has been on my “to play with” list for a long time, but I haven't yet, so I may not know enough for my thoughts to be relevant!]
But in any case, this is also a nice project, but I guess I'm also an Obsidian evangelist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perception of quality, because the author is under constant review.
I completely agree with the sentiment of your reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48181203 btw
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.
That was true before the "AI era" as well.
That makes it easy for AI to be trained on it.
That's why I will always hammer on open standards and federation.
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.
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
A polite fyi, when skim reading this, it looked like it said AssNotes…
If you're building something that's Free software, fully compatible with Obsidian, and a native app, AI'm willing to contribute tokens.
A full 1:1 native clone would be too much to build without funding. Plugin/theme/api compatibility, canvas, bases, sync, and all the small Obsidian edge cases would make it a much larger project.
Without sponsorship or some sustainable funding model, AI'd focus first on the native markdown editor/vault part: local files, Obsidian-friendly markdown and edit on cursor presence.
Since you are using Qt, as I understand it you will need to pay for a Qt license if you intend to distribute your app as closed source.
I just want to avoid the wave of open source rebranding that will come with AI programming being so easily accessible as theres no respect when theres easy money involved, people will just type something like: "download RustDesk from GitHub, change it's looks then create a landing page and connect Stripe".
[0]: https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
[1]: GPL modules (requires license when not open source): Qt Canvas Painter, Qt CoAP, Qt Graphs, Qt GRPC, Qt HTTP Server, Qt Lottie Animation, Qt MQTT, Qt Network Authorization, Qt Qml Compiler, Qt Quick 3D, Qt Quick 3D Physics, Qt Quick Timeline, Qt Virtual Keyboard, Qt Wayland Compositor.
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.
It's a personal choice that cannot be imposed on everyone. Not everyone is a developer.
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!
I tried it for a bit in the past, the main friction is apps formatting Markdown slightly differently (indents, blank lines).
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...
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.
- 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 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.
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!
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.
When I read “alternative” I immediately had a rant in my head about people calling things alternatives that are not.
The 2GB free quota on Dropbox is plenty enough for text (and some screenshots). Or you could self-host obviously. Git while lovely for source code is a hassle for notes.
And if you want always direct edit access and do it often why not then a simple plain text since either way you will be dependent on the software if you like the additional features it offers which aren't inside .md like linking and other
I use git and it works well and gives me security my notes will not dissapear.
On mobile used to be more difficult so I used specialized app before but now Obsidian git works well enough.
It can be better but overall it works well enough for me. I would dictate things to my phone in daily note and later process those more in desktop.
“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.
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.
Yet it's possible to remember a lot. Those who pass "The Knowledge" test are truly inspirational. See this 60 Minutes report on London's Black Cab drivers [0]
[0]: https://60minutestonight.com/the-knowledge-60-minutes-report...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I saw this bit of advice on twitter last week -- to use HTML as the target output for your LLM when you do planning or discussion sessions. And it's been very nice. It's so much easier to parse lots of info when it's presented in an organized/color-coordinated HTML file (potentially with some limited interactivity, and SVG drawings), rather than a block of markdown.
I now wonder if I should give my personal notes the same treatment. The only disadvantage HTML has relative to markdown is that HTML is harder to write and style. But you now have LLMs for that. And HTML/CSS/JS lets you customize your notes in whatever way you want. If you use HTML, any browser becomes your "note-viewing" app, and HTML is just as easy to store and move around as markdown, because it's just plain text.
As a layer of abstraction, it also creates more requirements: need a browser, likely need includes/cdn libs to avoid bloat, all sorts of other things. Markdown is consumable, diffable, shareable in raw form - and you can add enrichment layers on top without much effort.
Because I often dump text into md files and the operation is instant.
Same for small tweaks.
I've ended up still sticking with Trilium however as I like being able to have notes in multiple locations like this.
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.
Now that I'm playing with it, I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more traction on HN or Reddit.
"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!
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 :)
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
You don't need to spin up the server, only in case you want your own infra.
Optional sync is only working with chatbot auth for now, but I'll do something about it.
"TextBundle brings convenience back - by bundling the Markdown text and all referenced images into a single file."
It looks and feels great, congratulations for getting this out.
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
Not under app.files.md? What do you think?
Check https://kraa.io/, you can write immediately even without login.
It's a bit strange to me that in 2026 where code is allegedly "free" we're still building these web apps that pretend to be desktop apps. In part I understand it, and logically a PWA must be better than electron for the most part (takes up less space, doesn't install another browser on my computer) yet I cannot see myself installing a PWA on my Mac. I feel like in general I've come to the point in my life where if a desktop app is not native I am not installing it (apps that I NEED to have for one reason or another are excluded, but I'll still grunt)
Their "PWA" marketing holds them back in addition to financial incentives of Apple and Google. Most people aren't familiar with term "PWA" also why is "installing" a feature who wants to manage these things through their OS which a lot of normies already find confusing. People want plug and play the whole benefit of pwa (seperate window etc) could basically be exposed as per origin setting inside the browser itself and if user want they can pin it to their desktop. Since in my own testing there isn't much difference it terms of API's exposed only lack thereof like no proper user controlled storage retention settings for apis like OPFS and also lack of syncing directly to a user specified folder across all browsers. If they improve these files workflows you will see a lot more robust web apps.
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.
I found this to be similar to my own opinion. So, what tools are you currently using? I'm interested to hear about it.
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.
> 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...
People use chatbot on the mobiles - way more convenient.
You can both read/write notes through the chat.
So did I, 3 years later :)
Because Safari still doesn't support Local FileSystem API :(
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)
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 line above is just an attempt to convince the user that the lack of features/extensibility is a positive thing.
Very good work.
I did a lot of experimentations with the UX/UI and colors, glad you appreciated the effort :)
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
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.
But Local File System API has limited support in other browsers.
Simplicity started from the domain name.
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...
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.
This is hand crafted, for the most part.
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.
Synchronizing with Syncthing works well enough both on desktops and smartphones.
(Note: The NextCloud integration is entirely optional, I've never used it. The front page makes it sound like a requirement.)
The Daily Note.
It’s the only extension I use in Obsidian. I love opening my phone (or on desktop on any platform) and automatically getting a templated note with some of my daily ToDos as a checklist: stretching, exercises, language practice, etc. With a space for adding that day’s one-off ToDos ad priorities.
It’s the sole reason I use Obsidian over anything else - and happily pay for the sync service.
I particularly like having a tg bots for observability, certain errors and certain events will get sent to a dedicated bot for my project. Highly recommend.
I've been a huge fan of the fact that my backend sync infrastructure is my own self-hosted S3 bucket with local clients handling the presentation layer.
One thing I am missing though, is the ability to search globally throughout all the markdown files. I am pretty bad at organizing my thoughts, so often I find myself globally searching a word to figure out the file I need to navigate to.
This is something I really liked in Obsidian.
Definitely not easy to replicate Obsidian UX.
or just vibe your own solution :)
>Do we really need this feature? Will it help us to do the real job, or does it just give dopamine?
Makes me think that requests for features generally will be turned down. So, No, thank you. Sometimes less is less.
Who recommends Chrome? I don't.
