For pure viewing rather than another editor, I’ve made a https://mdview.io - useful for opening Markdown files with clean rendering, tables, and Mermaid support and then share it with your colleges or save for later
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.
The mobile capture gap is real and it's what kills most of these tools as daily drivers. The flow that's worked for me: Drafts (iOS) with an action configured to append to a dated inbox.md in a git repo, synced via Working Copy. The Markdown files are the source of truth; any macOS tool (Tolaria, Obsidian, whatever) reads from the same repo with no conversion step.
It's a few moving parts to set up, but the payoff is that mobile capture and desktop organization are actually the same files rather than a paste/sync step in between.
I built something recently for myself which is based on the any device philosophy using a Telegram bot approach and like the creator of this app uses a private Github repo as the source of truth.
I use it for just collecting anything I find interesting around the web.
I actually largely solved this with OpenClaw — i send stuff via telegram and it creates good notes in Tolaria, already linked to what exists and what's relevant
I send web links of tools that I want to store of resources, voice notes to be turned into written notes, etc
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?
What about Microsoft OneNote...
I did not get why we need yet another app...
OneNote syncs to the cloud so I can keep my mobile and pc synced... and backed.
I can paste multimedia stuff...
My use case is keeping notes, screenshots sometimes, whatever in the same format sometimes...
Wouldn't you feel limited by the markdown. What is the use case?
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!
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 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?
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.
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.
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)
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).