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

Hey there! I am Luca, I write https://refactoring.fm/ and I built Tolaria for myself to manage my own knowledge base (10K notes, 300+ articles written in over 6 years of newslettering) and work well with AI.

Tolaria is offline-first, file-based, has first-class support for git, and has strong opinions about how you should organize notes (types, relationships, etc).

Let me know your thoughts!

github.com

159 points

lucaronin

8 hours ago


61 comments

smadam9 4 hours ago

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.

  • ericol 3 hours ago

    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.

    • smadam9 3 hours ago

      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.

  • ItsClo688 3 hours ago

    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.

Manik_agg 10 minutes ago

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.

dewey 2 hours ago

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?

wkcheng an hour ago

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.

johntopia 36 minutes ago

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

hk1337 34 minutes ago

First thing curious about is opening this up on a docs/ folder in one of my projects and see how it is with that.

ajbd 2 hours ago

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?

stock_toaster 6 hours ago

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

SpyCoder77 6 hours ago

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

dhruv3006 3 hours ago

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

msephton 3 hours ago

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

  • ikdiendoehdj an hour ago

    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.

r0bbie 7 hours ago

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!

antonkochubey 7 hours ago

Doesn’t Obsidian already do pretty much the same?

  • tarr1124 4 hours ago

    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.

    • fiatpandas 2 hours ago

      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.

  • hoppyhoppy2 7 hours ago

    >open-source

    • jimmcslim 7 hours ago

      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.

      • astrocat 2 hours ago

        > I’d love some app with the polish of Bear Notes but that just edited raw Markdown files.

        Typora? (https://typora.io/)

    • dragonfax 5 hours ago

      Huh, somehow I had no idea that Obsidian wasn't open source. I guess I was fooled by the open source plugins.

    • bovermyer 7 hours ago

      Zettlr would like a word.

      • morelikeborelax 6 hours ago

        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.

  • jryio 6 hours ago

    Exactly - cooperation is not incentivized properly

  • kid64 5 hours ago

    Yes, but the claim is presumably that this one is good.

subdomain 8 hours ago

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.

bovermyer 6 hours ago

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.

Pym 7 hours ago

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!

redaantar 6 hours ago

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.

  • QuantumNomad_ 4 hours ago

    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

ItsClo688 3 hours ago

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?

  • gnabgib 3 hours ago

    I thought the thing that got you was "tolaria feels like a library"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47884835

    • ItsClo688 2 hours ago

      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

aldielshala 5 hours ago

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

moralestapia 4 hours ago

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

npv789 4 hours ago

notion killer

amd92 5 hours ago

[dead]

kskzjsjdjw 6 hours ago

A freaking web app?

Boo. Boooooooooo. Thanks but no thanks.

  • droidjj 6 hours ago

    At least it's Tauri!

    • ikdiendoehdj an hour ago

      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.

jryio 7 hours ago

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

  • rglover 7 hours ago

    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.

  • johntopia 37 minutes ago

    unacceptable comment. hacker news is misunderstood as a toxic community because of fellas like you. have some dignity.

  • lbreakjai 6 hours ago

    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.

  • ikdiendoehdj an hour ago

    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).

  • BirAdam 5 hours ago

    You do realize that would have once described GCC and Linux, right?

    • tredre3 2 hours ago

      Of Linux, yes. Of GCC, no. From the very beginning there was multiple authors and the project was a mishmash of several other projects.