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Posted by lucaronin 3 hours ago

Show HN: Tolaria – open-source macOS app to manage Markdown knowledge bases(github.com)
Hey there! I am Luca, I write https://refactoring.fm/ and I built Tolaria for myself to manage my own knowledge base (10K notes, 300+ articles written in over 6 years of newslettering) and work well with AI.

Tolaria is offline-first, file-based, has first-class support for git, and has strong opinions about how you should organize notes (types, relationships, etc).

Let me know your thoughts!

89 points | 30 comments
moralestapia 52 seconds ago||
Hey Luca this is great, trying it now. The UI is gorgeous, congratulations!
smadam9 30 minutes ago||
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.

SpyCoder77 1 hour ago||
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
stock_toaster 1 hour ago||
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

redaantar 2 hours ago||
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.
QuantumNomad_ 26 minutes ago|
On a tangential note, do you have any recommendations for course platforms that offer paid courses with videos being 100% without DRM?

I was severely disappointed late last year when I revisited one platform where I had previously dropped quite a bit of money in the past to buy access to many courses and I now wanted to finally download them for offline watching only to find that in each and every course I had bought access to on the platform it is only the first couple of videos that are without DRM and then all of the remaining videos in each of the courses use Widevine DRM.

I even investigated a bit whether Widewine DRM is possible to decrypt but it seems to be very difficult, requiring knowledge and access to things that I doubt I would be able to figure out.

I would rather in the future spend money on courses that are not DRM protected in the first place, than to give any more money to any learning platforms where they use DRM on the videos.

Topics of interest include:

- Advanced software development

- Distributed systems

- SQL database internals

- Debugging

- Reverse engineering

- 3d modelling in Blender and rendering

- Vulkan graphics programming

- Game development with Godot

- Piano playing techniques

- Electronic music production with Ableton Live

- Mixing and mastering tracks with Ableton Live + any third party VSTs necessary

- Drawing and painting digitally

- DJing, turntablism and scratching on digital DJ controllers

aldielshala 47 minutes ago||
Curious how it handles 10K+ notes performance-wise, does it index everything or lazy-load?
r0bbie 3 hours ago||
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!

bovermyer 2 hours ago|
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.
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