Why I built Jylos

Hi everyone,

I started Jylos as a personal project because I've always been fascinated by personal knowledge management and open-source software.

I love tools like Obsidian, Joplin and Evernote, and I wanted to explore what building a desktop knowledge management application from scratch in Java and JavaFX would look like.

What started as an experiment with JavaFX, Markdown processing and software architecture slowly evolved into a complete local-first application with features like wiki-links, backlinks, an interactive knowledge graph, plugins, themes, Kanban boards, Git synchronization, encrypted notes, Knowledge Insights, advanced search and workspaces.

Jylos is not intended to replace the amazing tools that already exist. My goal was to contribute something back to the PKM and open-source communities: another option with a different technology stack and a strong focus on ownership of your own data.

Everything is stored locally. There are no accounts, no cloud backend and no telemetry.

I built Jylos because I genuinely enjoy creating software, and I believe the open-source ecosystem becomes stronger when developers share what they build.

I would love to hear your thoughts, ideas, feature requests or criticism.

Thank you for taking the time to check out Jylos.

— Eduardo