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.

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.

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.

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.

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, this comes up pretty much every time Obsidian is mentioned... to the point where I'm curious as to where the idea that it's open source comes from in the first place.

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!

because open source is a means not an end. folks want good, fast software that respects them. open source isn't the only way there.

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 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 always just assumed!

If AI’m building isn’t a typo, I kinda like it as a way to accurately claim what I’m building with AI.

That's really cool!

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 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

What makes Golang a great fit in your opinion?

You might like what I made for myself https://github.com/pratikdeoghare/brashtag

I read that, but opt'd instead to write a script to live serve md as html pages with mermaid diagrams and syntax highlighting. Such that the md itself can be put into things like github and for github to be able to render it. Works well.

For me, a key tenant of any good note taking system is low friction. Leaning on an LLM feels like significant friction. Formatting something into HTML manually also feels like a lot of fiction. Individual HTML files for notes would also be a friction filled experience for opening and browsing, without some kind of template to allow for navigation of the notes within the browser. This ends up turning into a local wiki very quickly.

AI will have to be very reliable, fast and free to replace md files with HTML.

Because I often dump text into md files and the operation is instant.

Same for small tweaks.

I have a simple script that previews md pages as html and hosts a liveserver so it dynamically updates, renders mermaid / syntax highlighting etc. Super useful when working with an agent when planning out a piece of software. Page dynamically updates as you go, and super useful to have diagrams visible. I'm prompting a lot more to get diagrams included as part of the planning stage (or whenever).

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...

I recommend the helix text editor with the markdown-oxide LSP (and rumdl formatter if you feel fancy). All open source and even if you never update them they will work forever.

TiddlyWiki?

https://tiddlywiki.com/

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)

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.

Scope out minimal.app (or minimal.app/#beta for anyone who wants to contribute to the roadmap). Opinionated, native-only, extremely focused.

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 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

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!

I use tree-md for same end when I want to see my markdown a bit prettier https://github.com/Epistates/treemd

This is perfect! thanks for sharing it

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...

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

Glad I read this! I love Helix and have been looking for a way to have some extra note taking features without loosing my favourite editor. Will definitely give markdown-oxide a try!

Glad I read about this! I love helix and have been looking for some bonus features for note organisation without having to ditch my favourite editor, will defi

> 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.

Right, but most people want to be able to consult their notes on the go, quickly add items from their phone, etc.

> 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

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.

I bought this domain with the promise that one day I'll release my pet-project.

So did I, 3 years later :)

Thanks! I love being honest. Notes alone wouldn't do.

Not very classy to piggy back off of this post to advertise your own text editor. Just make a new "Show HN" post.

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?

Idk it's pretty common practice to have your landing page at the base url, with the app itself located on a subdomain. Off the top of my head I think of standardnotes, linkwarden, raindrop.

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.

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

In Safari it should work in OPFS.

Because Safari still doesn't support Local FileSystem API :(

As soon as all major browsers support Local FileSystem API :)

Hm. I thought that there's one single binary + one script to deploy, so Docker is not needed...

I added a table with all possible setup options: https://github.com/zakirullin/files.md#ways-to-use-it

You'll right on this - I'll cover this in great detail.

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.

Thanks a lot! I've been perfecting things for 5 years. A week ago I decided to open source it finally :)

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

Once they'll support Local FileSystem API!

You can use any browser.

But Local File System API has limited support in other browsers.

Like other commenter referenced, the markdown-oxide LSP replicates the core of obsidian better than obsidian does. I use it with helix. I described by setup in more detail above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180639

I use vimwiki. I know vim and appreciate not having to learn a new thing. The output is just markdown files linking to each other, so it's very portable.

Maybe leaf : https://github.com/RivoLink/leaf

nvim + markdown oxide is the closest I've found https://github.com/Feel-ix-343/markdown-oxide

Thanks for your warm words!

I did a lot of experimentations with the UX/UI and colors, glad you appreciated the effort :)

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.

Thanks! That's what I was striving for :)

Simplicity started from the domain name.

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/ ??

> 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.

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.

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