HelixNotes — Local-First Markdown Notes
helixnotes.com
A local-first markdown note-taking app. Your notes stay on your machine. No cloud, no lock-in.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43147928

I built a note-taking app because the one I wanted didn’t exist. Clean UI, local .md files, no cloud, no account.

Built with Rust + Tauri 2.0 + SvelteKit. Full-text search powered by Tantivy. Graph view, AI writing tools (bring your own key), Obsidian import, version history.

Available for Linux (AppImage, APT, AUR), Windows, and macOS. Source: https://codeberg.org/ArkHost/HelixNotes

  • vort3@lemmy.ml
    1·
    10 hours ago

    Can you tell me more? Is it FOSS? Is it electron? Is it a UI for a folder of markdown files? Is there a native android app? What is “native” syncing? Do I have to pay for some kind of cloud?

    • u_tamtam@programming.dev
      1·
      7 hours ago

      You can see by yourself at https://triliumnotes.org/

      It’s FOSS, it’s web so you can use it hosted, or local first as an electron app, or both and then they will sync together.

      It is NOT a UI for a folder of markdown files, because that’s silly when you expect from your system to hold relationships, metadata, rich note types, notes to coexist in multiple places, etc. Since it’s FOSS, and since you can sync your notes real-time and distributed across machines, there’s nothing wrong with this.

      You can use the web version on Android as a PWA, but it won’t sync offline. There are workarounds to run a local server on your device for that use cases (not ideal in terms of user-friendlyness, but gets the job done).

      You don’t need to pay anything to anyone if you host it yourself or if you keep it local. There is no official hosted plan, some people offer to do that for a tiny fee at https://www.pikapods.com/ (never used them, some people say they are decent).