I built a note-taking app because the one I wanted didn’t exist. Clean UI, local .md files, no cloud, no account.
Built with Rust + Tauri 2.0 + SvelteKit. Full-text search powered by Tantivy. Graph view, AI writing tools (bring your own key), Obsidian import, version history.
Available for Linux (AppImage, APT, AUR), Windows, and macOS. Source: https://codeberg.org/ArkHost/HelixNotes
Thanks for all the feedback everyone. Just shipped v1.1.0 based on what was reported here today:
- Obsidian wiki link import fix
- macOS Cmd key shortcuts (was showing Ctrl)
- Frontmatter no longer modified on notes you don’t edit
- KaTeX math support
- Daily Notes
- Tag management (single + batch)
- View mode toggle + focus mode improvements
- Source mode search
- Notebook delete confirmation
- Collapsible sidebar tags
Note taking App, AI in the front page… I don’t think you understand the point of taking notes.
AI is optional, disabled by default, and doesn’t even show in the UI unless you enable it. The app works fully offline with zero AI involvement.
All I know is tauri is the name given to Earth by the goa’uld. When did this came up? Everytime I blink another language appears
Notix. Notes + helix avoid confusion with the other app, Notix
Never worked with any note taking apps except for Vim with customized snippets and rudamentary helper scripts.
While such an app seems very appealing, I haven’t seen any of them featuring the useful stuff, such as pluggable editor (in my case Vim or NeoVim), template support (day journal, meeting, README etc…), rendered fields (e.g.: today, author, or arbitrary values), support for pandoc rendering, doc metadata management (tags, keywords, related docs, links) or markers in text eg. @TODO etc… (idea being to aut. create lists of paragraps with such markers)
What’s the point of a note taking app that provides help with editing single docs and maybe with rendering to HTML, but doesn’t help organizing and remembering stuff?
Different use case. HelixNotes is for people who want a clean, simple note-taking app that works out of the box - not a customizable text processing pipeline. If Vim snippets work for you, stick with that. Not every tool needs to be for everyone.
Oh hey I’ve been looking for “obsidian but with version history “ for a bit now.
Give HelixNotes a try :)
Your website says “No sync. No lock-in. No bullshit”
Would you mind elaborating on the thought there? Why no sync?
I use obsidian with self hosted live sync, my notes are mine and they live on my hardware, but they are always in sync between my devices. If I’m on my desktop and take notes, I can pull them up on my laptop or even my phone. With this, I can’t reference my notes (or update them) until I’m back on my desktop.
The line “No sync. No lock-in. No bullshit” tells me you’re opposed to it on principal, meaning you don’t intend to ever add the ability to sync, and that’s a nonstarter for me and a lot of people I image. I’d love to migrate from obsidian to something open source, and I’d love to potentially spend time working on contributing a self hosted live sync like feature, but I need to know if my work and pull request will be immediately rejected on a principal I’m not sure I understand?
Good question. “No sync” means no built-in cloud sync - not that sync is impossible. Your notes are plain .md files in a folder, so you can sync them with Syncthing, Nextcloud, rsync, Git, or anything else you already use. The app watches the filesystem for external changes and picks them up automatically.
The philosophy is: I don’t decide where your files go. You do.
As for contributions - absolutely welcome. PRs won’t be rejected on principle. If you want to work on a self-hosted sync feature, open an issue on Codeberg and let’s discuss the approach first. I’d love to see it.
Sounds good, I’m trying out the app and seeing if I can really use it to replace obsidian, and I might dedicate some time to contribute if I end up using it. I agree with your assessment that obsidian’s customization with its plugin eco system leads to it becoming a side project that you have to baby instead of just a note taking app.
I don’t use a lot of plugins on obsidian, but I use rely on a few that make organizing notes easier, mainly:
- Daily notes: I really like being able to click one button to create a note with a date and organized into date folders, these are usually quick notes that reference bigger notes. Not being able to do it with a click means I just won’t do it at all, so my quick notes could very quickly become a giant list of unorganized files in the vault root.
- Templates: not a huge deal, I can manually apply templates from a template .md file, but it’s a nice feature.
On sync, two problems with using “whatever” to sync entire vault:
- I have to install and configure syncing on every device, and make sure they’re connected
- Merge conflict and sync order! I used to use seafile I sync, and I can’t tell you how frustrating it was to lose entire notes because they were overwritten externally.
Great feedback.
- Daily notes - not there yet but it’s a straightforward feature to add. I’ll put it on the roadmap.
- Templates - same, noted.
- Sync conflicts - fair point. HelixNotes watches the filesystem for external changes, but conflict resolution when two devices edit the same note is a real problem with any file-based sync. Syncthing handles this better than most (it creates conflict copies instead of overwriting), but it’s not perfect.
If you end up trying it and want to contribute, open issues on Codeberg for what you’d like to see. Contributions are very welcome.
Very nice. The screenshots look promising!
MacDown is pretty solid, but I’ve been looking at alternatives. Unfortunately, while MarkText may be feature-rich, latency is untenable. I think that one’s an Electron app.
Thanks! Latency was one of the main reasons I went with Tauri instead of Electron. HelixNotes launches instantly and stays light. Give it a try.
Plugin support?
Not at this stage. It’s something I’m considering but the priority is getting the core experience right first.
Totally understandable at this stage. As soon as it appears on the roadmap I’m in. Need my templater :)
