note.md
Local-first markdown based workspace for research writings
719 followers
Local-first markdown based workspace for research writings
719 followers
note.md is a private, local-first markdown based research workspace. Combining note taking, citation manager and reading all in one macOS native space. Additionally your vault of cited notes can be used as memory for your AI Agents.
This is the 2nd launch from note.md. View more
note.md
Launched this week
A local-first research workspace for Mac. Read papers, manage sources, take markdown notes, cite evidence, and turn literature into structured writing — instead of juggling Zotero, Obsidian, PDF readers and writing apps.
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Launch Team
note.md
@andreaigner Congrats on the launch! 🎉 Love the local-first approach, especially for research. Does note.md support importing existing notes from apps like Obsidian or Apple Notes?
note.md
@nicole_hynek Thank you so much!
Regarding your Question... Most of the current users I have been talking to, have been using Obsidian before. So as of now you can effortlessly connect your Obsidian vault to a project in note.md but we haven't explored any other options besides that and importing plain .md files yet.
@andreaigner Congrats on the launch! I'm using Obsidian right now but I need something like note.md instead -- great job!
@andreaigner @xichiwoo Me too, curious to hear how this product is different than apps like notion and obsidian and what the use cases are for it?
note.md
@mikereachium
Good question. Quick version: note.md is basically Obsidian + Zotero in one, with Notion's easy writing.
From Obsidian it takes the local Markdown vault and knowledge graph, but you write block-based like Notion instead of in raw Markdown syntax. From Zotero it takes the literature side — read your PDFs, manage sources and citations, pull figures and tables straight out of your papers into your notes.
Neither Notion nor Obsidian really does the source half — that's the gap it fills. Use case is research: anywhere reading papers and writing notes/citations should live in one place instead of four apps.
@andreaigner A local-first research workspace that combines note-taking, citations, and reading in one place is exactly what academic workflows are missing — most solutions make you jump between 3 or 4 apps to do what this does in one.
Two things I'm curious about: How granular are the privacy controls for the vault when it's used as AI agent memory? Local-first is a strong promise — curious whether that holds when the agent memory feature is active, or whether any data leaves the machine at that point.
And is there any plan for cross-platform support? macOS native is a solid foundation but a lot of researchers and students are on Windows or Linux.
note.md
@lingha_dharshan_anparasu
On privacy: the line is clean and worth being precise about. note.md's own AI features — source indexing, semantic search, figure extraction, evidence scan — all run fully on-device. Nothing leaves the machine, ever. That's the default and it's non-negotiable.
The agent-memory part is opt-in and separate. If you connect an external agent like Claude via the Filesystem connector, you're choosing to let a cloud model read those files — so at that point data does go to that provider, by definition, because that's where the model lives. note.md isn't sending anything; you're granting an agent access to a folder, and you control which folder and when. So the honest framing is: local-first by default and on its own, and you decide if and when an external agent is allowed in. The vault doesn't quietly phone home — you open the door.
On cross-platform: macOS-native is the foundation for now, mostly because the local AI pipeline is deeply tied to the Apple stack. Windows/Linux is the most-requested thing and very much on my radar — Fair to call it a real limitation today.
@andreaigner This is basically my daily setup, a markdown memory folder Claude reads every session, plain files, no lock-in. The thing nobody warns you about: reading the vault is the easy part, curation is the hard one. Stale notes are worse than none, the AI will confidently cite something that was true three weeks ago. How are you handling freshness, any notion of a note going out of date, or is pruning on me?
note.md
@david_marko
What I did, because I hit that same wall: I gave the agent a web-connection Skill and let it read the citation in each note, then back-check that source against public info — arXiv and similar — to see whether the claim still holds. The key move is the last filter: it only reports things that are out of date and aren't already flagged as historic. So it's not nagging me about old notes I kept on purpose; it's catching the silently-stale ones — the "true three weeks ago" case you described, where nothing in the vault itself contradicts it.
What made it work is the open-folder design plus the citations. Notes carry their source reference in plain Markdown, so the agent has something concrete to look up and verify against the outside world, rather than just reasoning over the vault in isolation. Librarian, not ghostwriter — it surfaces "this looks outdated, you didn't mark it historic," I decide.
Today it's a Cowork job I run on my own vault, not a one-click feature yet — but honestly that's the argument for the whole local/open approach: I didn't have to build a new feature for note.md, I just pointed an agent at plain files. Making it a first-class flow is high on my list.
It works fine for me, but I don't trust it blindly. My vault for my current project is not small, but also it is not that big that it's impossible to manually check if the agent workflow messed something up.
Foyer
The interesting tension here is that "local LLM memory" means very different things depending on how retrieval actually works. Are you chunking and embedding the markdown files so the model can do semantic search across them, or is it more like context stuffing where relevant notes get injected into the prompt window at query time? That distinction matters a lot for how well it handles a large, messy note library versus a small tidy one. Also curious whether note.md watches files for changes and updates the index automatically, or whether syncing is a manual step.
note.md
@fberrez1
For the notes themselves: we deliberately don't run our own embedding/retrieval layer over the vault. The Filesystem connector just exposes the folder as plain files — so the agent of choice does its own retrieval over them: reading, searching, pulling what it needs into context. We're not pre-chunking or injecting a vectorised note layer; whether it's closer to "smart search" or "context stuffing" is really up to the agent's own strategy on top of plain files. We chose that because it keeps the vault honestly just-files, with no hidden index the notes depend on — and because the agent is already good at navigating a real filesystem.
For the sources it's a whole other story — that's where the real on-device pipeline lives. When you import a PDF, we extract it locally, chunk it, and embed it, so semantic search runs as proper hybrid retrieval (meaning + keywords) across your whole source corpus, entirely on your machine. That's the part built to scale to a large, messy library — and it's also what powers the source indexing, figure/table extraction, and the evidence scan that finds support and contradictions for a claim. None of it touches a server.
The local-first angle for note.md caught my eye, especially paired with markdown and research writing. How are you thinking about people moving existing .md files into the workspace — is it meant to work with an existing folder structure, or more as a dedicated place where notes and drafts live together?
note.md
@mia_qiao
Good question. both, by design. note.md works on plain folder of Markdown files, so you can point it at an existing vault and keep your structure as is. It reads your files, it doesn't reorganise them. The block editor just gives you a Notion-style way to write into those same .md files.
One honest caveat on citations: they are stored as standard Markdown links pointing at a notemd:// reference, so the file stays clean Markdown and your prose is fully portable but those citation links only resolve inside notemd, since they hook into the built-in reference manager.
The notes are yours and portable, but the live source link is the one app-specific piece.
note.md
@luki_notlowkey
Great framing. Honestly all three matter, but if I had to name the sharpest edge: it's that note.md is local-first and yours, and that's the one thing NotebookLM can't follow me on without becoming a different product.
NotebookLM is genuinely great at Q&A over a set of sources, but it's a cloud silo you query, not a workspace you own. Your material lives on Google's servers, and the output is answers, not a body of work that accumulates. note.md inverts that: everything is plain Markdown in real folders on your machine, every AI feature runs on-device, and nothing leaves. Same reason it doubles as memory an agent like Claude can read and write directly, your vault is files, not someone's database.
The second edge follows from the first: it's a place you write, not just ask. NotebookLM answers questions; note.md is where reading, sourcing, and drafting compound into something that's still there, and still yours, a year later.
And a deliberate philosophical split: my AI is a librarian, not a ghostwriter. It surfaces what you've read and the evidence for and against your claims, rather than thinking for you. NotebookLM leans toward giving you the answer; I'd rather sharpen your own.
Huge congrats on the update! Keeping the vault as plain Markdown files while opening it up to AI is a game-changer.
Since it reads the folder structure directly, do you have any tips for how to organize notes to make it easiest for an agent like Claude to navigate?
note.md
@doganakbulut
I can't give you a real best practice, but what I learned so far:
The usage of wiki links is a game changer. Claude does not receive the graph that the user sees but It sees that there is a connection to another article and will most likely load that into the context as well. So keeping your notes connected where topics are overlapping is something I would definitely recommend.
note.md
@harshchandgotia
That distinction is basically the whole thesis of note.md. A note is a means; the thing you're actually building is a connected body of understanding — and most tools optimize for capture (get the note down) while quietly neglecting the part where it becomes knowledge.
A few choices fell out of taking that seriously. Sources aren't an afterthought — a claim is linked to the evidence it rests on, because knowledge you can't trace back isn't really yours yet. The graph and links exist so structure is visible, not just storage. And the AI is deliberately a librarian, not a ghostwriter: it surfaces what you've read and the evidence for and against a claim, but it doesn't write your prose — because the deliberate thinking is the research, and outsourcing it hollows out the exact part that builds knowledge.
So the bar I hold the whole app to is: does this help understanding accumulate, or does it just help notes pile up? Capture is easy. Compounding is the hard, interesting part.
Congrats on the launch! Keeping the vault as an open, flat directory of plain Markdown files is a huge win for portability. I'm curious about the background file-watching mechanics. If a user modifies their .md files or directory structure externally via terminal or another editor like Obsidian, note.md seamlessly detects and re-indexes those changes on the fly, or is a manual re-sync required to keep the reference manager and source connections aligned?
note.md
@juno_dost
this is something note.md is specifically designed to handle, so external edits are a first-class case, not an afterthought.
Short answer: it's automatic. No manual re-sync needed.
note.md runs a live file-system watcher (built on macOS FSEvents) against your vault directory. When you edit a .md file in Obsidian, change something from the terminal, add or delete files, or restructure folders, the watcher picks that up and kicks off an incremental merge in the background — the sidebar tree, the reference manager, and the graph connections all realign on their own.
A few details worth being transparent about:
- It's incremental, not a full rescan. Each file is fingerprinted by modification time and size, so unchanged files are skipped and only what actually changed gets re-indexed. That keeps it fast even on large vaults, and the update carries through to exactly the articles that were touched — so wikilinks and source connections stay consistent without rebuilding everything.
- An open editor won't get clobbered. If you have a note open in note.md and it changes on disk underneath you, note.md does a three-way reconcile rather than blindly overwriting. If the changes don't conflict it fast-forwards silently; if they do, you get a conflict banner so you decide. You won't lose work to a background sync.
- The on-disk files are the source of truth. note.md treats your vault directory as canonical and mirrors it, which is exactly why editing in Obsidian or via terminal "just works" — there's no separate database you have to manually reconcile against.
So in practice: edit wherever you like, however you like, and note.md keeps the reference manager and source graph aligned on the fly. Manual re-sync exists as a fallback, but day to day you shouldn't need to reach for it.