Show HN: Tolaria – Open-source macOS app to manage Markdown knowledge bases (github.com)

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.

Just another disposable piece of software maintained by a single person that does 80% of what other apps do but worse.

Max lifespan 2 years

Doesn’t Obsidian already do pretty much the same?

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!

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'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.

A freaking web app?

Boo. Boooooooooo. Thanks but no thanks.

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

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

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Curious how it handles 10K+ notes performance-wise, does it index everything or lazy-load?

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.

notion killer

Hey Luca this is great, trying it now. The UI is gorgeous, congratulations!

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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

not gonna lie - wow the 10k notes over 6 years thing is what got me! most knowledge base tools fall apart at that scale because the organizing system becomes the job. wondering do you ever just let something be unstructured, or does everything have to be tagged in?

I would be all over this if it was a native macOS app

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?

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?

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.