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.

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.

Why not obsidian?

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.

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

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?

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

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

obsidian already exists. and works on linux.

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.

I've been wanting something like that for a while. Love it, thanks.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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!

>open-source

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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

I hAvE a FeW qUaLmS wItH tHiS aPp

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

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.