Show HN: Cahier – A knowledge base with native support for research (getcahier.com)

2 points by felipefar ↗ HN
I'm happy to be on Hacker News to present my most recent project. Cahier is a personal knowledge management system created to support out of the box the research workflow. It allows you to both store and consume study documents (PDFs, web pages, etc.), manage the annotations from those documents, and produce written content based on them.

It goes further than existing reference managers because we chose to make the annotation management a part of the application, so you can organize and centralize highlights in notes and special document elements.

It's a local-first, native application for Windows and macOS, created to be a research companion for serious readers.

Here's a more detailed method that uses the app: https://felipefarinon.com/articles/a-method-for-doing-resear...

4 comments

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This is really, really cool. One-time $60 seems extremely fair. The one nit I had was that I couldn't figure out where the files would be stored. It seems like local, but maybe it's cloud?

I'd want it to be local and would like some moderate assurance that I could build an alternative UI if I so choose to.

I'm glad you liked it! I thought from the start to ask for a price that I myself would pay. The files are stored locally, so there's no cloud involved at the moment.

The attachments are stored as files in a directory, while annotations, notes and the folder structure are written to a SQLite database. I haven't made commitments yet regarding the database format, but I could look into documenting and creating compatibility requirements for it.

Is that something you need?

i'd pay today, but no Linux
I'm considering on supporting it. What kind of package and for what distro would you need?

But some users use it through Wine for the moment.