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Show HN: Octarine – a fast, lightweight, opinionated Markdown notes app (octarine.app)

44 points by rajatkulk ↗ HN
Hey HN! I’ve been building [Octarine](https://octarine.app/) for a little over 2 years. It started because I wanted a note-taking app that was:

- Lightweight (< 30MB, fast to launch, no Electron bloat).

- Opinionated (good defaults, clean UI, not a plugin bazaar).

- Yours (all plain Markdown, nothing proprietary).

---

- Command bar (Cmd/Ctrl+K) to navigate and run commands quickly.

- WYSIWYG editor (rich text without live preview jumping).

- Git sync built-in — backups to GitHub/GitLab, no plugins.

- Natural language dates (“yesterday”, “last week”).

- Multiple workspaces, templates, tags, graph view.

- Backup anywhere — iCloud, Dropbox, Syncthing.

- Tabs & Panes — split and rearrange notes/graphs like a code editor.

*Pro Features*

- BYOK for over 9 AI providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Gemini and more!

- Ask Octarine — chat with your notes (RAG, embeddings done on-device).

- Writing Assistant — Sidebar assistant to help rewrite, improve or create.

- Focus Mode — distraction-free, sentence spotlight.

- Customisation — 30+ fresh themes, different paper types.

- Locked Notes — Disallow a note from editing.

- Folder Customisations — Add icons/colors to folders, have them manage their own unique sorting.

*FAQ*

- Free plan gets updates forever; some features are Pro.

- Pro is a one-time license (no yearly “updates tax”).

- Over 130+ releases shipped.

- iOS app is in development.

- Overlaps with Obsidian, but follows different methodologies about having less but baked in features, over an extensible plugin system (each work for different users)

---

Try it: [octarine.app](http://octarine.app)

Changelog: [octarine.app/changelog](https://octarine.app/changelog)

Documentation: [docs.octarine.app](https://docs.octarine.app)

I’d love your feedback - what works, what feels off, what’s missing? Always open to ideas (and criticism).

11 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 29.7 ms ] thread
winter_blue
This is amazing, and truly impressive.

What's the best place to submit issues, feature requests, etc?

Something I use on Obsidian is my own CSS as a theme (to override default editor styling). I see themes is a feature of Octarine. Will users be allowed to set their own CSS as a "custom theme"?

vladsanchez
I fought the urge to try anything else other than https://Dendron.so The wait is over. Seems like the perfect replacement, it checks all the boxes: "Lightweight, Opinionated, Yours".

I predict you HUGE success!

Thanks for your work.

PixelForg
Looks awesome! What's the tech stack btw?
nfbx
this is really really well designed in comparison to apps like obsidian, since the standard design is actually very readable and actually makes you want to write stuff. i think this could replace my current zettler setup in writing papers when you could map hotkeys to most stuff, and it would have a zotero integration in some way. lovely project!
Naga293
This looks really nice, love how clean the UI is.
maheshgawali
Been an early supporter Love the features, simple and fast Looking forward to more task mgmt features to help organize the day along with note taking Please add dictation and summarise mode too Don't need collaboration features but could be great to have Google drive support to backup the data.

All the best and keep up the good work

nashashmi
Does it have multi cursor support? CTRL-shift D highlight for all occurrences of a selected text? That is the only reason I spin up VScode for.
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sprremix
I'd like to know the train of thought behind your idea of "Let's add an FPS counter to my Markdown editor".

Incredibly sorry to sound so negative, but nothing about this seems legitimate to me and I would never trust any of my files to this application.

rajatkulk
I used it during dev for debugging, figured to just expose it for anyone that is used to having a counter on top of their games :)

If an fps counter makes an app seem illegitimate to you, and the countless changelog, user testimonials don’t help, then nothing I say will convince you otherwise, so I’m not going to waste either of our times :)