I love this! It is like you have taken all the things I want from Obsidian (plus plug-ins) and made them into a single, well designed app. Great!
Feedback:
* This is so good you should find a way to keep it open source but also profit from it so you can develop it full-time. You could just have an official app version - I would pay for that.
* Feature creep. I am a big fan of Bear App for it's wonderful simple design, although I stopped using it because it doesn't work on markdown files directly. What I've seen is that equivalent apps/services (including Obsidian, Notion, Craft) are continuously adding new features. You've already got all the core features I think - try to avoid feature creep, and keep it focused on just doing the core things really well, like Bear App does.
You beat me to it by a day! But well done Luca. The tool looks excellent and I'm trying it out now.
I'm building Sig <https://github.com/adamjramirez/sig-releases> and the architecture overlap is obvious: macOS, plain markdown, git-versioned, designed as context for AI agents.
The difference is where in the workflow we start. Tolaria seems to excel at organizing knowledge that already exists. Sig is trying to solve what happens before that - how to get the knowledge out of your head and into files in the first place. Most of what actually determines the quality of your AI output was never written down: the decision made in the last five minutes of a meeting, the verbal commitment with no follow-up, your actual read on what a conversation meant (not the surface version).
Sig's capture is two layers: 1) factual record first, 2) your personal interpretation on top. Both stored as markdown on your machine. When you're ready to share to a team knowledge base/open brain, it's an explicit decision to do so and opt-in — private by default, team-readable only when you choose.
if "git versioned" means the .md files themselves, I'm sold. I am actually processing files using a git based workflow in order to tell claude what to look at.
Yes, the .md's are in their own repo, locally. The entire UI is a layer on top of that repo. The UI has some underlying mechanisms that abstract the git operations away from the user, but that doesn't stop a power user from jumping in the shell and accessing the repo directly.
The "magic" starts when Sig contributes to another, remote repo - a central knowledge base that all teammates' local Sig can pull from, and contribute toward.
the distinction you're drawing is real, totally agree that tolaria feels like a library, sig feels like a field recorder. both necessary, just different moments in the workflow.
I often fall back to Apple Notes (I know not really a knowledge base, or markdown) because it syncs between my devices and it's usable on the phone. Is this something you have a need for yourself, or how are you looking at your notes on mobile?
The mobile capture gap is real and it's what kills most of these tools as daily drivers. The flow that's worked for me: Drafts (iOS) with an action configured to append to a dated inbox.md in a git repo, synced via Working Copy. The Markdown files are the source of truth; any macOS tool (Tolaria, Obsidian, whatever) reads from the same repo with no conversion step.
It's a few moving parts to set up, but the payoff is that mobile capture and desktop organization are actually the same files rather than a paste/sync step in between.
I actually largely solved this with OpenClaw — i send stuff via telegram and it creates good notes in Tolaria, already linked to what exists and what's relevant
I send web links of tools that I want to store of resources, voice notes to be turned into written notes, etc
I downloaded and am trying it out, but I'm running into a pretty annoying sorting bug that's preventing me from using it for real. I copied over files from my Obsidian vault (preserving file times), and the first time it loaded, everything seemed to work fine. After doing the first git commit, however, Tolaria cannot seem to sort properly by last modified anymore (I'm getting notes from 2023 or 2025 up at the top). The file system tree still has the correct modified and created times.
Exciting stuff Luca. Cool to see you're using BlockNote as the editor (project I'm working on). Let us know if you have any feedback for us / features you'd love to see!
I tried it and it looks really nice but like most of these it has too many small editing thorns for me to use. Two I noticed right away
- ctrl-a works to go to start of line but for some reason ctrl-e doesn't work to go to end
- ``` doesn't start a code block, you have to use 'insert code block'
Good job on paste image from clipboard though which is another feature that I think is completely essential for something like this and weirdly missing in many of them.
``` should definitely start a code block! I do it all the time, and also just tried it now. Can you try again or tell me what you see? Simply nothing happening?
The “types as lenses, not schemas” principle and the focus on structure + relationships really stand out.
How do systems like this handle temporal stuff over time? (things that change over time, decisions that get revisited, outcomes that didn’t exist when the note was created?) Do those live as relationships between notes, or is there a different pattern for it?
I started Tolaria in Swift but met very real limitations especially in the Markdown editor part. It's very hard to build something that is Notion like in that department with Swift.
At least for me it’s not about speed, but the npm ecosystem: I try to avoid running npm deps in my home computer (if any, I run them in VMs, but a KB should run in the host I believe)
I just built a markdown-style editor for iOS that is highly performant with files of 5000 lines.
Every keystroke is restyled in under 8ms: no debouncing, no delayed rendering. 20 rapid keystrokes are processed in 150ms with full restyling after each one. Tag and boolean searches complete in under 20ms. Visible-range rendering is 25x faster than full-document styling. 120Hz screen refresh supported.
App file size is 722 KB.
If I can do it on iOS then it's must be 10x easier on macOS.
Precisely. It would be awesome if it were an ACTUAL application.
I don’t care if it’s Tauri, Electron or whatever’s the new flavour of the same old lazy ass webwrapper technology.
A web app is not an actual application. Besides, I already have a browser, I don’t need another one just to open a single page so it can pretend to be an app while adhering to absolutely ZERO platform behaviour patterns.
Either go it native, or don’t even bother. If it can be run in a webwrapper, it can be run my ACTUAL a browser.
Hey luca, heavy obsidian user here and went through your website and github. Def will try it out. Connecting codex with Tolaria to manage your knowledgebase is something i'm looking forward to try.
One thing about obsidian is that it’s not open source. So if one day they change something and you don’t like it, you will be forced to use a different KB. That means to change your flows, the ux, etc. That’s a big downside from my pov (it’s good that obsidian allows you to take your files with you, but for me that’s not enough)
I get the obsidian question all the time! The differences are:
- better note organization with types and relationships
- different, more Notion-like UX
- first class support for git as sync + version control layer
- long tail of design decisions that help AI work well with vaults: types, MCP, git authorship, etc
- and most of all... open source!
Obsidian and these newer tools share markdown + local files, but they're aimed at different assumptions about who reads and edits the vault. Obsidian's default is "human reads and curates; plugins optionally enhance." The AI-first cohort (Tolaria, Sig in the sibling comment, and several others) assumes the AI reads and writes as a first-class agent, which makes design choices like how the app reacts to files changing underneath it (cf. the Zettlr comment downthread) a core concern rather than an edge case.
Worth watching how each of these tools positions the AI: as a UX copilot inside the editor, or as an autonomous agent with file-system access via local CLI/MCP.
It would be nice if you could “see” the AI in your vault making changes. Almost like a Google doc collab session. Even if you weren’t directly interacting with the agent, and it was making change thru a CLI/MCP, its presence would be highlighted in the frontend. And then it appears as its own contributor in the git history.
And I was going to say Mac native as well, but uses Tauri. I’d love some app with the polish of Bear Notes but that just edited raw Markdown files. Ideally Obsidian with the Notebook Navigator plugin (strongly inspired by Bear Notes perhaps?) and (checks list) this very specific list of plugins that I need and should be good for everyone else thanks.
Really interesting project. I like that this seems focused on organizing relationships between ideas instead of just being another notes editor. A lot of tools handle documents well, but fewer help build an actual knowledge system.
That’s awesome! I’m a huge fan of projects like that. I recently launched ckourse.com (open-source) to help manage downloaded courses. Combining tolaria and Ckourse will give a smooth learning experience. Thanks for the tool.
On a tangential note, do you have any recommendations for course platforms that offer paid courses with videos being 100% without DRM?
I was severely disappointed late last year when I revisited one platform where I had previously dropped quite a bit of money in the past to buy access to many courses and I now wanted to finally download them for offline watching only to find that in each and every course I had bought access to on the platform it is only the first couple of videos that are without DRM and then all of the remaining videos in each of the courses use Widevine DRM.
I even investigated a bit whether Widewine DRM is possible to decrypt but it seems to be very difficult, requiring knowledge and access to things that I doubt I would be able to figure out.
I would rather in the future spend money on courses that are not DRM protected in the first place, than to give any more money to any learning platforms where they use DRM on the videos.
Topics of interest include:
- Advanced software development
- Distributed systems
- PostgreSQL database internals
- ZFS file system internals
- Debugging
- Reverse engineering
- 3d modelling in Blender and rendering
- Vulkan graphics programming
- Game development with Godot
- Piano playing techniques
- Electronic music production with Ableton Live
- Mixing and mastering tracks with Ableton Live + any third party VSTs necessary
- Drawing and painting digitally
- DJing, turntablism and scratching on digital DJ controllers
Sadly, most of the big names (Udemy, Coursera, ...) are using encrypted streaming with DRM, but there are Khan Academy, Harvard, MIT,... courses that you can download and use locally. But most people are downloading the courses from torrents illegally (I don't advise doing this).
I run a newsletter too, so this is cool to see! Not sure if I need it yet (my "knowledge base" is still pretty small), but I'll definitely keep it in mind for the future.
not gonna lie - wow the 10k notes over 6 years thing is what got me! most knowledge base tools fall apart at that scale because the organizing system becomes the job. wondering do you ever just let something be unstructured, or does everything have to be tagged in?
Personally, I don’t really care which flavour of webwrapper this is. If it ain’t native, I ain’t bothering. Web pages belong in the browser, not in a browser-container pretending to be something it is not—an actual app.
You're right. We should absolutely only rely on "Ask sales for price" closed-source software from megacorps, that get worse on every release, and get sunset anyway when the funding runs out.
Of all the things to judge this on, you chose the most ridiculous one. Why shouldn’t a project like this exist just because there are “bigger” alternatives out there?
If youre gonna shut this one down, at the very least do it for the right reasons such as the fact that this is a webwrapper—absolutely disgusting, either go native or don’t bother shoving your webpage into a browser-container and calling it what it is not (an app).
I love this! It is like you have taken all the things I want from Obsidian (plus plug-ins) and made them into a single, well designed app. Great!
Feedback:
* This is so good you should find a way to keep it open source but also profit from it so you can develop it full-time. You could just have an official app version - I would pay for that.
* Feature creep. I am a big fan of Bear App for it's wonderful simple design, although I stopped using it because it doesn't work on markdown files directly. What I've seen is that equivalent apps/services (including Obsidian, Notion, Craft) are continuously adding new features. You've already got all the core features I think - try to avoid feature creep, and keep it focused on just doing the core things really well, like Bear App does.
big fan of Bear! It was a big influence for Tolaria — that's why you like it!
thank you for the great feedback mate
You beat me to it by a day! But well done Luca. The tool looks excellent and I'm trying it out now.
I'm building Sig <https://github.com/adamjramirez/sig-releases> and the architecture overlap is obvious: macOS, plain markdown, git-versioned, designed as context for AI agents.
The difference is where in the workflow we start. Tolaria seems to excel at organizing knowledge that already exists. Sig is trying to solve what happens before that - how to get the knowledge out of your head and into files in the first place. Most of what actually determines the quality of your AI output was never written down: the decision made in the last five minutes of a meeting, the verbal commitment with no follow-up, your actual read on what a conversation meant (not the surface version).
Sig's capture is two layers: 1) factual record first, 2) your personal interpretation on top. Both stored as markdown on your machine. When you're ready to share to a team knowledge base/open brain, it's an explicit decision to do so and opt-in — private by default, team-readable only when you choose.
if "git versioned" means the .md files themselves, I'm sold. I am actually processing files using a git based workflow in order to tell claude what to look at.
I'll definitely give this a spin.
Yes, the .md's are in their own repo, locally. The entire UI is a layer on top of that repo. The UI has some underlying mechanisms that abstract the git operations away from the user, but that doesn't stop a power user from jumping in the shell and accessing the repo directly.
The "magic" starts when Sig contributes to another, remote repo - a central knowledge base that all teammates' local Sig can pull from, and contribute toward.
the distinction you're drawing is real, totally agree that tolaria feels like a library, sig feels like a field recorder. both necessary, just different moments in the workflow.
Everybody is building their own llm-wiki systems these days. I have my own and compiled a big list of other agent memory systems in it: https://zby.github.io/commonplace/agent-memory-systems/ I'll add yours promptly.
And just today I also vibed a wish list (based on all the material I gathered) for such systems: https://zby.github.io/commonplace/notes/designing-agent-memo...
I wish we could collaborate.
Here's another one for your list https://github.com/Signet-AI/signetai I am not affiliated, just testing it out.
I often fall back to Apple Notes (I know not really a knowledge base, or markdown) because it syncs between my devices and it's usable on the phone. Is this something you have a need for yourself, or how are you looking at your notes on mobile?
I solve it by using Apple Notes for quick capture and then copy pasting from my mac to obsidian daily/specific notes, that I want to keep.
I also just keep long running notes for tracking things workouts and meals with headers for dates.
Works better than things like obsidian mobile and copy pasting is a natural filter.
Good tips!
>I also just keep long running notes for tracking things workouts and meals with headers for dates.
This I'd say fine on the phone but frustrating heading to the Mac and start wishing for at least a spreadsheet.
The mobile capture gap is real and it's what kills most of these tools as daily drivers. The flow that's worked for me: Drafts (iOS) with an action configured to append to a dated inbox.md in a git repo, synced via Working Copy. The Markdown files are the source of truth; any macOS tool (Tolaria, Obsidian, whatever) reads from the same repo with no conversion step.
It's a few moving parts to set up, but the payoff is that mobile capture and desktop organization are actually the same files rather than a paste/sync step in between.
I actually largely solved this with OpenClaw — i send stuff via telegram and it creates good notes in Tolaria, already linked to what exists and what's relevant
I send web links of tools that I want to store of resources, voice notes to be turned into written notes, etc
but I will still build a mobile version for sure!
Nice work! This looks really cool.
I downloaded and am trying it out, but I'm running into a pretty annoying sorting bug that's preventing me from using it for real. I copied over files from my Obsidian vault (preserving file times), and the first time it loaded, everything seemed to work fine. After doing the first git commit, however, Tolaria cannot seem to sort properly by last modified anymore (I'm getting notes from 2023 or 2025 up at the top). The file system tree still has the correct modified and created times.
that's weird will look into it! thanks for reporting
Exciting stuff Luca. Cool to see you're using BlockNote as the editor (project I'm working on). Let us know if you have any feedback for us / features you'd love to see!
I've been using octarine[1] recently (after having used obsidian for quite a while), but I'm definitely going to try this out.
[1]: https://octarine.app
I tried it and it looks really nice but like most of these it has too many small editing thorns for me to use. Two I noticed right away
- ctrl-a works to go to start of line but for some reason ctrl-e doesn't work to go to end
- ``` doesn't start a code block, you have to use 'insert code block'
Good job on paste image from clipboard though which is another feature that I think is completely essential for something like this and weirdly missing in many of them.
``` should definitely start a code block! I do it all the time, and also just tried it now. Can you try again or tell me what you see? Simply nothing happening?
As I was scrolling down the page I was like "what if I wanted to use a notion-style editor instead of markdown" and my requests were instantly met
The “types as lenses, not schemas” principle and the focus on structure + relationships really stand out. How do systems like this handle temporal stuff over time? (things that change over time, decisions that get revisited, outcomes that didn’t exist when the note was created?) Do those live as relationships between notes, or is there a different pattern for it?
I love how you have used markdown here !
We kind of have used the exact philosophy in https://voiden.md/ - offline-first, file based and support for git.
This is exactly the format agents will use pretty well.
We have done this for APIs.
We are open source too. Take a look here : https://github.com/VoidenHQ/voiden
I would be all over this if it was a native macOS app
I started Tolaria in Swift but met very real limitations especially in the Markdown editor part. It's very hard to build something that is Notion like in that department with Swift.
But give it a try because Tauri is very fast
At least for me it’s not about speed, but the npm ecosystem: I try to avoid running npm deps in my home computer (if any, I run them in VMs, but a KB should run in the host I believe)
I just built a markdown-style editor for iOS that is highly performant with files of 5000 lines.
Every keystroke is restyled in under 8ms: no debouncing, no delayed rendering. 20 rapid keystrokes are processed in 150ms with full restyling after each one. Tag and boolean searches complete in under 20ms. Visible-range rendering is 25x faster than full-document styling. 120Hz screen refresh supported.
App file size is 722 KB.
If I can do it on iOS then it's must be 10x easier on macOS.
https://www.gingerbeardman.com/apps/papertrail/
Precisely. It would be awesome if it were an ACTUAL application.
I don’t care if it’s Tauri, Electron or whatever’s the new flavour of the same old lazy ass webwrapper technology.
A web app is not an actual application. Besides, I already have a browser, I don’t need another one just to open a single page so it can pretend to be an app while adhering to absolutely ZERO platform behaviour patterns.
Either go it native, or don’t even bother. If it can be run in a webwrapper, it can be run my ACTUAL a browser.
FUCK WEB APPS.
First thing curious about is opening this up on a docs/ folder in one of my projects and see how it is with that.
I've been wanting something like that for a while. Love it, thanks.
Great app! One thing I'd love to see is a mobile version — I find myself searching my notes on my phone more often than on desktop.
I could help you build IOS potentially.
Hey luca, heavy obsidian user here and went through your website and github. Def will try it out. Connecting codex with Tolaria to manage your knowledgebase is something i'm looking forward to try.
Why not obsidian?
One thing about obsidian is that it’s not open source. So if one day they change something and you don’t like it, you will be forced to use a different KB. That means to change your flows, the ux, etc. That’s a big downside from my pov (it’s good that obsidian allows you to take your files with you, but for me that’s not enough)
Super impressive for a solo project! How does this compare to capacities.io ?
Super nice! I've ended up settling on Logseq for note-taking for a while now, but never loved the UI.
This is clean and love the git-backed approach. Would love to see a dark mode too!
great job luca! looking forward to reviewing this :) i'm a heavy obsidian user but i really like your "inbox" concept.
Doesn’t Obsidian already do pretty much the same?
I get the obsidian question all the time! The differences are:
- better note organization with types and relationships - different, more Notion-like UX - first class support for git as sync + version control layer - long tail of design decisions that help AI work well with vaults: types, MCP, git authorship, etc - and most of all... open source!
Obsidian and these newer tools share markdown + local files, but they're aimed at different assumptions about who reads and edits the vault. Obsidian's default is "human reads and curates; plugins optionally enhance." The AI-first cohort (Tolaria, Sig in the sibling comment, and several others) assumes the AI reads and writes as a first-class agent, which makes design choices like how the app reacts to files changing underneath it (cf. the Zettlr comment downthread) a core concern rather than an edge case.
Worth watching how each of these tools positions the AI: as a UX copilot inside the editor, or as an autonomous agent with file-system access via local CLI/MCP.
It would be nice if you could “see” the AI in your vault making changes. Almost like a Google doc collab session. Even if you weren’t directly interacting with the agent, and it was making change thru a CLI/MCP, its presence would be highlighted in the frontend. And then it appears as its own contributor in the git history.
the idea of being git-first it's exactly for that! so you can setup AI as a git contributor and see its changes clearly
>open-source
Huh, somehow I had no idea that Obsidian wasn't open source. I guess I was fooled by the open source plugins.
And I was going to say Mac native as well, but uses Tauri. I’d love some app with the polish of Bear Notes but that just edited raw Markdown files. Ideally Obsidian with the Notebook Navigator plugin (strongly inspired by Bear Notes perhaps?) and (checks list) this very specific list of plugins that I need and should be good for everyone else thanks.
> I’d love some app with the polish of Bear Notes but that just edited raw Markdown files.
HelixNotes? ( https://codeberg.org/ArkHost/HelixNotes )
> I’d love some app with the polish of Bear Notes but that just edited raw Markdown files.
Typora? (https://typora.io/)
Zettlr would like a word.
I really like Zettlr, but I find it is always crashing when markdown changes behind the scenes and it has the document open.
It's so good for viewing all markdown in a repo, but dies all too often.
Exactly - cooperation is not incentivized properly
Yes, but the claim is presumably that this one is good.
Really interesting project. I like that this seems focused on organizing relationships between ideas instead of just being another notes editor. A lot of tools handle documents well, but fewer help build an actual knowledge system.
Wow thanks!
Better than the one I was planning to build for myself.
Love the UI. Love the fact that the app was made with Tauri.
Nice work, will share!
That’s awesome! I’m a huge fan of projects like that. I recently launched ckourse.com (open-source) to help manage downloaded courses. Combining tolaria and Ckourse will give a smooth learning experience. Thanks for the tool.
On a tangential note, do you have any recommendations for course platforms that offer paid courses with videos being 100% without DRM?
I was severely disappointed late last year when I revisited one platform where I had previously dropped quite a bit of money in the past to buy access to many courses and I now wanted to finally download them for offline watching only to find that in each and every course I had bought access to on the platform it is only the first couple of videos that are without DRM and then all of the remaining videos in each of the courses use Widevine DRM.
I even investigated a bit whether Widewine DRM is possible to decrypt but it seems to be very difficult, requiring knowledge and access to things that I doubt I would be able to figure out.
I would rather in the future spend money on courses that are not DRM protected in the first place, than to give any more money to any learning platforms where they use DRM on the videos.
Topics of interest include:
- Advanced software development
- Distributed systems
- PostgreSQL database internals
- ZFS file system internals
- Debugging
- Reverse engineering
- 3d modelling in Blender and rendering
- Vulkan graphics programming
- Game development with Godot
- Piano playing techniques
- Electronic music production with Ableton Live
- Mixing and mastering tracks with Ableton Live + any third party VSTs necessary
- Drawing and painting digitally
- DJing, turntablism and scratching on digital DJ controllers
Sadly, most of the big names (Udemy, Coursera, ...) are using encrypted streaming with DRM, but there are Khan Academy, Harvard, MIT,... courses that you can download and use locally. But most people are downloading the courses from torrents illegally (I don't advise doing this).
obsidian already exists. and works on linux.
I tried this on my Mac. Excellent concept, and the 10k notes is promising. Is there anything similar to this for Windows?
releasing it over the next couple of days
I run a newsletter too, so this is cool to see! Not sure if I need it yet (my "knowledge base" is still pretty small), but I'll definitely keep it in mind for the future.
I'm glad you've built something that works for you! Keep at it. Experiment, don't just leave it the same way it is now.
you bet it!
not gonna lie - wow the 10k notes over 6 years thing is what got me! most knowledge base tools fall apart at that scale because the organizing system becomes the job. wondering do you ever just let something be unstructured, or does everything have to be tagged in?
I thought the thing that got you was "tolaria feels like a library"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47884835
fair, i do sound like one sometimes. new here, still finding my voice, guess i haven't earned the benefit of the doubt yet from the og crowd like you
Hey Luca this is great, trying it now. The UI is gorgeous, congratulations!
thank you so much!
Curious how it handles 10K+ notes performance-wise, does it index everything or lazy-load?
notion killer
A freaking web app?
Boo. Boooooooooo. Thanks but no thanks.
At least it's Tauri!
Personally, I don’t really care which flavour of webwrapper this is. If it ain’t native, I ain’t bothering. Web pages belong in the browser, not in a browser-container pretending to be something it is not—an actual app.
Just another disposable piece of software maintained by a single person that does 80% of what other apps do but worse.
Max lifespan 2 years
Please cut this out. You really don't want to live in a world where individuals are discouraged from trying to build things that are good.
If you want something to stick around: you have to use and pay for it.
But if they ever choose to decommission it, they have the chance to do the funniest thing:
https://scryfall.com/card/plst/INV-156/obliterate
You're right. We should absolutely only rely on "Ask sales for price" closed-source software from megacorps, that get worse on every release, and get sunset anyway when the funding runs out.
I hAvE a FeW qUaLmS wItH tHiS aPp
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
unacceptable comment. hacker news is misunderstood as a toxic community because of fellas like you. have some dignity.
Of all the things to judge this on, you chose the most ridiculous one. Why shouldn’t a project like this exist just because there are “bigger” alternatives out there?
If youre gonna shut this one down, at the very least do it for the right reasons such as the fact that this is a webwrapper—absolutely disgusting, either go native or don’t bother shoving your webpage into a browser-container and calling it what it is not (an app).
Some people...
You do realize that would have once described GCC and Linux, right?
Of Linux, yes. Of GCC, no. From the very beginning there was multiple authors and the project was a mishmash of several other projects.