Hi HN, Nick here. We’re launching OpenKnowledge (https://openknowledge.ai/), a “what you see is what you get” markdown editor that has direct integrations with Claude, Codex, and other agents. Available as MacOS app or Web UI+CLI. Fully free/local and OSS.We built this because we wanted a Notion-like experience for writing and sharing markdown files across our team. Obsidian is the best alternative we tried, but found it doesn’t have a true WYSWIG UI and it didn’t integrate well with Claude/Codex outside of community plugins.
So we built OpenKnowledge. It takes shape as:
1. A MacOS app with a file navigator, the WYSIWYG editor, and link explorer.
2. Integrations with the Claude, Codex, and Cursor desktop apps. The agents can open an OpenKnowledge editor within their embedded web browsers for a side-by-side experience.
3. Built-in mcps, skills, and RAG for LLM-wiki and “AI Second Brain” scenarios + spec writing
4. An embedded terminal and CLI for TUI-first users
OSS stack includes: Tiptap/prosemirror, CodeMirror, yjs (CRDT), Electron (MacOS app), Orama, remark/rehype/micromark/mdast, @pierre/trees
On the architecture side, the interesting eng. challenges included:
1. A pipeline to convert ProseMirror to markdown in a bidirectional lossless way. ProseMirror uses ASTs, which are not designed to have byte-fidelity.
2. A dual-observer CRDT to keep the ProseMirror and markdown state in-sync.
The CRDT + git also power a collaborative experience that shows what Agents are doing in the markdown, have undo/redo, and version history. The “Share” and cloud-sync functionality are geared for team collaboration. They feel “no-code” but leverage git/GitHub under the hood, which also means data stays fully private.
In that spirit, we made OpenKnowledge open source for anybody who’s curious or who’d like to contribute.
We’re actively thinking about plugins/extensibility and what’s next. If you have suggestions or feedback, would love to hear it.
▲I would love to try it, can I sign up for a Linux desktop app notify-list?
reply▲I really wanted to like this, but unfortunately couldn't see how it improves my experience over Obsidian or VS Code.
The fact that I have to juggle between OpenKnowledge and Codex to engage the AI, while also accepting a barebones Obsidian, is a real bummer. From what I can tell, you are saving me a few key strokes with moving prompts around. What I really want is the AI to live IN the app, like VS Code, and then move around the documents like it is Obsidian. I'll accept a plain terminal, but a pretty UI would feel like a better fit. My sense is that the new value add here is a set of skills and mcp servers, which probably already exist for Obsidian, or could more productively be spun up. I looked at the plugins again in Obsidian and found Claudian, which lets me bring my local models and Codex in the right pane. This is perfect, so sorry your app is not for me (yet), but thanks for getting me to look again at my tooling.
I want to throw my vote in for local models. Gemma4-31b is working well for me on these types of tasks, and not having an easy way to plug that in is a deal breaker. Embeddings should certainly have a local option, as they are cheap to compute. For what it is worth, I use LMStudio which supports OpenAI and Anthropic compatible api endpoints, so it should be easy to wire in.
A big caveat, I'm not trying to share my vault with other people, and I can see making that pain go away being worth switching. That said, I feel like you're targeting a weird market, where you want people technical enough to use LLMs and GitHub, but not so technical they can't customize a shared environment.
I would switch if the whole experience was self contained and "clean." Right now, it feels like a well dressed wrapper for pretty basic functionality.
altmanaltman26 minutes ago
[-] I have been trying to replace Obsidian with something for over 4 years now ever since I started using it. But I am just too comfortable now and I have it set up exactly the way I like and extended it with plugins etc.
I tried other stuff but nothing imo can beat its utility to me. I also personally wouldn't want an AI or anyone else looking through my vault or want AI in it.
Ack, thanks for feedback ! We're definitely looking at a more integrated experience.
reply▲pcthrowaway7 hours ago
[-] Fully local, but can't integrate with any local LLM?
I do think a fully OSS Obsidian-like that syncs natively is an impressive accomplishment, though the usefulness of this is limited with OSX being the only supported platform. If an Android app is in the works I'll definitely follow the project!
Got it. MCP Server and CLI is agent-agnostic, so should work with local models/harnesses, but we'll look into more explicit docs around this.
What IDE or harness do you use? We'll take a look.
pcthrowaway6 hours ago
[-] Personally I just want to see more support for local LLMs. I haven't been doing much coding lately but am interested in setting up Qwen 3.6 if I can obtain the hardware
reply▲Agree same. We'll look into explicit guides and integrations with Zed // OpenCode as a starting point, they let you choose your model.
reply▲pcthrowaway6 hours ago
[-] Amazing, thanks. I've decided to try daily driving this instead of Obsidian, but I'm a bit curious how the syncing works. I copied an Obsidian vault to a new folder, and when I start the import process in OpenKnowledge it asks me if I want it "shared" or "local only". If I select "Shared", where does the git repo live that other instances of OK sync from?
edit: This seems to be "team-oriented" rather than geared towards individuals who might want to edit their notes from multiple devices?
And only seems to be able to sync with github... In addition to my privacy concerns, I'm curious if there could be issues with lots of images and other attachments since git can choke on repos that contain lots of larger files without github's git-lfs extension.
Last question I have is if any plugin system comparable to Obsidian's is planned (or already supported)? I realize this is probably a massive ask for an open-source project, and something Obsidian gets a lot of flack for as well, so I'm certainly not expecting it, but I am curious if it's on the roadmap already
To clarify, OpenKnowledge will never publish your project to GitHub automatically. When you init a new project, selecting "Shared" means that OK config files will not be gitignored. Selecting "Local" will add them to your gitignore. Other open knowledge instances can only sync if you have explicitly published your project to GitHub (which you can do from the app) and enabled auto-sync in OpenKnowledge. Some docs related to this can be found here
https://openknowledge.ai/docs/features/github-sync and
https://openknowledge.ai/docs/features/share.
It would make a repo in your own GitHub account. You can choose whether that repo is in your personal GitHub or your GitHub org. We'll make that clearer in the UX.
Feel free to ping me any additional feedback any time (here or @nickgomez on X).
vitorbaptistaa6 hours ago
[-] Congratulations on the launch. It looks neat!
On a side note, I find it interesting that a few recent projects are going for the Open Knowledge name. The Open Knowledge Foundation (https://okfn.org) is one of the first/largest proponents of the open data movement (think of it as a Free Software Foundation but for data, not software). They started in 2004 and developed many of the open data licenses and widely used infrastructure tools like CKAN (an open data portal platform).
Nothing to add, just found it interesting.
Disclaimer: I worked there for a few years.
Biased but great name of course haha.
OKF timing was coincidence, we'd started I take it around the same time they'd started internally.
What's good is that everything is pretty open formats/source and complimentary.
For ages I've been looking for a way to easily share & sync a simple knowledgebase (HTML/MD and other files in folders) with my team (= including non-technical people), using Git as the sync/versioning layer, without it being too technical, and without getting vendor lock-in with expensive & unnecessarily complex cloud-based platforms.
Having built-in AI integration without relying on sketchy plugins would be the cherry on top (although, seriously missing the option to connect with any openai-compatible LLM provider like someone else mentioned here).
Seems like this might almost offer exactly that? I'll have to try it out...
That was our exact stated goal -- felt a lot of the same pain. Feel free to drop me any feedback here or @nickgomez on X.
reply▲You should just integrate with pi.dev, like I did for
https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw (which has replaced Obsidian for me). I too integrated a terminal and a WYSIWYG Markdown editor (as well as plugins for a mindmap, kanban, etc.)
Looks very relevant, will take a look. Definitely looking at built-in-chat-ui, thinking about how to integrate with the harnesses.
reply▲Ye built in AI is the only way this makes sense to me. Or otherwise could just add a terminal where you can run any TUI mapped to that notes/vaults dir or something.
reply▲reply▲Two bits:
1. Name collison happenstance. We'd locked in the npm package and domains prior to their announcement.
2. Our templates are Open Knowledge Format compliant and we have an explicit quickstart around making an OKF knowledge base. You can think of OKF as a format/standard for the content, and OpenKnowledge (our app) as an IDE/editor for any type of markdown based content.
Sweet, let me know the experience, we're actively thinking about how to make OKF KBs editing a good experience. E.g. a linter or other conformant mode.
reply▲I'm working on a PKM myself, and while wysiwyg won't be my first priority and I'm aiming for a more hackable surface, this is very interesting and I'll most likely take inspiration from it for integrating AI workflows into my notes
reply▲Electron apps tend to fall down in the minutiae of the little things that native apps get right (around things like selection, scrolling, various small affordances across various levels). Would love to see something like this be more native app upfront, than starting out with something that will always leave that top 10% of what makes a nice feeling app unobtainable.
You win hard on this if you have the best possible UX that feels natural to drive. You just also ran if not because obsidian/notion etc. are already there (and have the people to put into those random edge cases that make electron apps bad).
Nice approach.
Personally I’ve been trying very hard to migrate away from git+Obsidian project setup according to the OpenAI Harness Engineering. It works wonderfully in Codex Desktop.
The only gotcha - I want to share knowledge bases with the team in a way that is:
(1) versioned (a la git, not Notion)
(2) usable from any chat (a la MCP)
(3) basic access controls for team setup.
(4) works through the interface that optimizes accuracy and token use across agentic architectures and LLMs.
Funnily enough, 4 is the easiest one (I have a platform for agent training and verification where I publish fun challenges for agents in simulated worlds around agentic commerce and personal OSes. With 98M agentic interactions recorded, that is already enough information for tuning)
Still figuring 1 and 3, though.
Gotcha. We're optimizing for the same scenarios, may be worth a look at our implementation in case transferable to yours. See:
#1 - the "autosync" and GitHub integrations do exactly this.
#2 - The app auto-instals skills/MCP server configs for a few harnesses
#4 - We embedded agentic-search capabilities via the MCP server (e.g. we virtualize 'ls' and 'cat' so we can enrich it for the agent for better hierchical navigation).
#1 - the tricky part there is in scenarios from a few AI Native teams. There often are a multiple agents rolling out linked changesets to a bunch of documents on behalf of controlling humans. Eg updating compliance policy, and references and change log and current procedures at the same time.
So changesets have to be atomic across multiple documents and semantic (so that agents can resolve the changes). Weak per-document versioning isn’t enough here.
#4. Nice! Same story, but also virtualizing ripgrep, find and tree (plus MD-aware outline mode). With that setup even agents with weaker local models (eg runnable on DGX Spark) can solve complex tasks in the Agentic Commerce domain.
Got it, makes sense. And neat ideas for the virtualization, will take a look.
reply▲I don't understand how Obsidian, a collection of markdown files, isn't already AI friendly. It's hard for me to imagine a more AI-friendly but still usable way to organize your notes.
reply▲What we did to go "beyond" is build in skills and an MCP server into the app, and auto-install those into e.g. Claude, Codex, and Cursor formats. Also added a web viewer so that e.g. Claude Desktop can open up the editor directly within it's embedded web viewer.
reply▲There is at least one MCP server in Obsidian's community plugins, plus the REST API access capability which is already addressed in several open source MCP plugins.
I use Obsidian as a persistent context store and knowledge graph (..loosely defined, i.e. link/back-link) for both Claude Code and Hermes, while also using it to generate live Wiki pages for working documentation. The native replication and the Git integrations work well keeping it all synchronized across multiple harnesses, as well. I use the native MCP server mentioned above, plus just letting the agent work with the markdown files directly.
That said, having built out all of this manually I'm excited to try out something that addresses much of this out of the box. I'd also be curious about the integration with Hermes/OpenClaw/etc.
Right on. We did a lot of the same and then had to deal with coaching everyone on the team how to do also set it up.
Large inspiration for OpenKnowledge was providing these flows out of the box.
We'll prioritize Hermes/OpenClaw guides next.
Feel free to drop me any feedback as you try it out - @nickgomez on X.
What was complicated about the setup? Its a plug-ins folder... add it in and boom you are ready to go
reply▲Keeping the MCPs/skills cross-compatible across the different harnesses, and also getting non-eng folks familiar with git.
reply▲Why not build skills and an MCP for markdown or obsidian? I'm using both at present and it's fine, bit would like to understand the differentiating factor here.
reply▲Example of the functionality that's OK specific: we made it so that e.g. Claude Desktop (or Codex, Cursor) can open the OpenKnowledge web viewer within their own embedded web viewers, to make for better side-by-side editing. Since Obsidian is closed source, we wouldn't be able to make that work.
Making the skills/MCP specific to OpenKnowledge allows us to optimize experiences like that.
Don't take this the wrong way, but couldn't this have been a plugin?
reply▲We wanted to make our own editor experience, allows us to do things like proper WYSWIG editing (Notion-like editor). MCP/AI integrations were one piece.
reply▲outside12346 hours ago
[-] This. I just open the Obsidian folder (aka "vault") in VS Code and BOOM, it is AI friendly. I just hack on the .md files like I would code with Copilot.
reply▲Same flow I had. We did a few things to make the flow easier, like making it easy for Claude Desktop to open the OpenKnowledge web viewer within its own web view. Also exposing things like vector search, etc.
Our goal was you wouldn't need a separate IDE and to work well with the coding agent desktop apps.
But alas -- markdown files on your local machine is indeed the way for being AI friendly.
But there’s no good WYSIWIG markdown editor extension for VS code.
reply▲Well there's quite a few options. The most popular I think is also open source (Markdown for Humans). Not sure what disqualifies it as "good" to you
reply▲Our bar was "Notion-grade", i.e. drag and drop blocks, slash commands, select to highlight/bold, etc.
I don't think I'd seen an extension that does that. It was a technically very hard problem, rich text editors usually use a lossy intermediary format (e.g. prosemirror).
Consider making the first image in the readme either static, or move slowly enough that there's reasonable dwell time to understand the UI when it's done with rendering. Right now there's nowhere on the gif that you can focus on to understand that part of the app in any detail, so it's basically a flashy box of randomness.
reply▲So it's just a Electron editor + "open in %agent" button...
I don't see any reasons to use it instead of. obsidian + my agents.
reply▲More
1. Webpage is lying and showing stuff what you don't have in the app
2. You made changes to my .zshrc without asking me.
3. Slow. Open and render tiny md file with 10 lines - 1s
Removed, will never install again
Looks solid. The Obsidian migration path is honestly the make-or-break.
reply▲We support most things except bases at the moment. Let us know if you see any gaps that are important for you.
reply▲simonebrunozzi4 hours ago
[-] How do you make money, and how will you pay for your salaries?
reply▲Don't ask our VCs. Kidding -- we're taking a look at what would make sense for a cloud solution. E.g. richer team collaboration, etc.
reply▲(We're same team behind Inkeep -- already have a healthy biz).
reply▲The signature figure on the repo shows file contents alongside a chat window. Is this actually supported by the app? I can't figure out how to open a chat window in the app without handing off to an external AI app.
reply▲The external agents can open the open knowledge web viewer within their own embedded web UIs.
Within the OpenKnowledge app itself, right now we do support the Claude terminal embedded inside - try that out. We're looking at adding more within-app capabilities soon.
I was really dissapointed whem realized that they sell on the webpage what they don't have in the app
Deleted immediately
You'll note that's the claude app if you actually look at the preview, which while confusing advertising what isn't even your app, does show how it works with the hand off.
reply▲Got this toast/notification message from your desktop app.
> Added ok to your PATH — managed block in ~/.zshrc, ~/.config/fish/conf.d/open-knowledge.fish.
Took a while to see that 'ok' is the name of your product.
Ack ! We made the shorthand for e.g. the CLI and .ok/ configuration folders. Shouldn't show up in the UX strings, we'll clean that up.
reply▲I've been using my opencode go subscription for Obsidian, saving my Claude sub for actual coding. Any reason why it's limited to Codex, Claude, and Cursor?
reply▲OpenCode is next on the queue. Each has it's quirks, just working through quality testing each.
reply▲What AI plugin do you use in Obsidian?
reply▲100% second for OpenCode. for a lot of people it's becoming a very important second choice. I use it for cheaper models when my $20 claude code runs out for the day and I get a lot out of it.
reply▲Yup, we're working on it, should have integration eod or tomorrow.
reply▲Would it possible to support Org Mode?
reply▲Could you share more on what's important for you there?
reply▲Org Mode is wiredly used in Emacs, taking notes etc, github also support org mode. As a knowledge editor, it is better to support.
reply▲Got it, we'll investigate.
reply▲claudiacsf10 hours ago
[-] I'm a sucker for pretty UIs. I already have a company-mandated knowledge base tool, Slite, can they be used together?
reply▲Looking into Slite now to check. With OpenKnowledge, the content is just markdown files on-disk, so there shouldn't be anything exclusionary about it. Not sure how/if Slite handles markdown files. Will take a look.
reply▲Neat, trying it out now. Are the Open Knowledge skills actually needed, if this is just markdown and folders? The skills are large, I'd prefer not filling up context.
reply▲Skills / MCPs are not hard requirement, they're tailored for the desktop agents to be able to leverage built in tools we make available for e.g. agentic search over the content and manipulating the open knowledge web viewer and editor.
reply▲The skills should be pretty progressive disclosure optimized but we'll do an audit.
reply▲Nice, thanks! On my first run on Codex desktop, it said the equivalent of “skill too large, reading it in chunks”. I have the pro subscription.
reply▲Sounds cool. How do agents know what else is going on in the doc? They have an embedded browser and they do like mutation observer type stuff? Or does the integration do polling?
reply▲Right now you'd simply prompt it. Working on more direct integration. Turns out they don't make event based back and forth easy.
reply▲macos only? shame.
reply▲CLI + Web viewer are available for Linux and Windows. We tested it and works pretty well.
reply▲beanjuiceII7 hours ago
[-] yea pass..
reply▲are you linux or windows? if linux, which distro? Electron support for distros varies so input is appreciated.
reply▲I recommend taking a look at appimages or flatpak within Linux if you wish to do so and if you do appimage, try to take an older system within a VM from my understanding as then you wouldn't have issues of glibc which I have sometimes heard. I'd be interested to help if that is of your interest.
reply▲Will take a look, appreciate it.
reply▲canadiantim2 hours ago
[-] Interesting using tiptap with codemirror, i guess to get around that tiptap doesn’t really support html very well but a shame that we need to use two editors to get the complete experience. Still, nicely done!
reply▲devCassius10 hours ago
[-] Is there a migration path from Obsidian or Notion? Switching costs are usually what keeps people locked in.
reply▲Since Obsidian is just markdown, you can just open an Obsidian vault with OpenKnowledge. We made it so that most Obsidian syntax is supported, like wikilinks.
For Notion, we don't have a migration tool, but you can try the export to markdown approach.
Recommend trying it to get a feel, and if are looking to migrate and facing friction let me know details.
Obsidian is a lot more than "just markdown" though.
For example, with the appropriate plugins like dataview and charts, it's possible to create dashboards, lists, and tables that update automatically based on data elements present in documents or documents themselves. I use it to have views over my to-do lists (daily routine items, tasks that are overdue, upcoming tasks, etc), make dashboards, and show lists of documents edited on a particular date.
I'd love to migrate away from Obsidian towards something that's not proprietary, but I haven't seen anything that allows querying other documents.
That doesn't mean it's a design direction that open knowledge should go in, but just a data point that reducing Obsidian vaults to "just markdown" misses what some users use it for.
Yes makes sense, the database site of it is the primary point we don't support yet. We want to do it in the way we think is best and will keep in mind how to make the experience good for existing Obsidian users.
reply▲jack_hanlon4 hours ago
[-] how does this differ from Rowboat ?
reply▲Haven't tried it, will take a look.
High level general purpose "IDE" for document editing (think Google Docs, Notion), that also exposes MCP/Skills for LLM wiki/second-brain scenarios.
Seems Rowboat is more focused on the personal assistant angle, we defer to your own agent (Claude, Codex, etc.) to do the LLM work.
Looks powerful. If you focus on notion-like elements you’ll go far. The product roadmap is there—their pricing is nuts.
reply▲Appreciate it. Editor should already be pretty "Notion-grade", more to do though.
What functionality is most important to you re:Notion?
Just my personal pref with your roadmap, don't waste time on the electron app, I would never use it. A webapp definitely with OpenCode support big on the list as well.
reply▲Ack !
re: Web app do you mean local web UI, or web hosted?
Look into Tauri, not electron
reply▲Nothing personal, but there genuinely ought to be
consequences for using "open source" in the context of something like this tied to proprietary AI services.
Local models should be the first choice in that framing.
It's not tied at all, the AI integration is on top of. So OSS applies to the app itself.
reply▲Integration with local models/harnesses is top the queue. What IDE or Harness do you use?
We're looking at OpenCode/Zed next but open to input.
Nice. the frontmatter question is the one i'd want answered before trusting it: when an agent edits a file does it round-trip YAML frontmatter and nested code fences cleanly, or does that stuff get mangled? every "wysiwyg markdown" tool i've tried falls apart there. Also is the CLI cross-platform or mac-only like the app?
reply▲CLI is cross-platform, works on Linux/Windows. We've tested it but the environments can vary, so definitely let me know if see any issues.
Re:front-matter, we do optimistic parsing of it, haven't seen any issues with it. If we detect invalid markdown we return warnings to the agent in the MCP response so it knows it needs to fix it.