Show HN: Tolaria – Open-source macOS app to manage Markdown knowledge bases

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 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.

Very nice. Reminds me Emacs org-mode. Does it do literate programming?

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.

Nice work, couple bits of feedback

* The editor doesn't seem to support code fence literals (as in I can't type ``` to get a code block)

* At very large markdown file sizes the performance is not great.

I'm building an obsidian-style markdown editor (for my own AI knowledge base product!) over at https://github.com/kenforthewin/atomic-editor

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.

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.

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'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 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

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

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.

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.

I would be all over this if it was a native macOS app

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.

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.

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!

Doesn’t Obsidian already do pretty much the same?

Super impressive for a solo project! How does this compare to capacities.io ?

great job luca! looking forward to reviewing this :) i'm a heavy obsidian user but i really like your "inbox" concept.

Why not obsidian?

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!

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.

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 tried this on my Mac. Excellent concept, and the 10k notes is promising. Is there anything similar to this for Windows?

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.

obsidian already exists. and works on linux.

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?

Hey Luca this is great, trying it now. The UI is gorgeous, congratulations!

Curious how it handles 10K+ notes performance-wise, does it index everything or lazy-load?

notion killer

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A freaking web app?

Boo. Boooooooooo. Thanks but no thanks.

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