Tolaria is a desktop application designed to help users manage markdown-based knowledge bases locally, with no database or lock-in. It provides a powerful yet simple way to organize notes, documents, and ideas while maintaining full control over your data.
Key Features:
Block-Based Editing: Edit content in small, manageable blocks for better focus and organization.
Git Integration: Use Git for versioning and syncing your knowledge base, ensuring seamless collaboration and backup.
AI Connections: Connect to local CLI coding agents and AI model providers for advanced note processing and insights.
Plain Markdown Files: Store notes as plain markdown files with YAML frontmatter, ensuring compatibility with any editor or tool.
Integrated Git Client: Simplify version control and syncing directly within the application.
Target Audience and Benefits:
Ideal for knowledge workers, researchers, writers, and teams who need a flexible, open-source solution to organize their ideas. Tolaria is perfect for those seeking local-first, AI-enhanced note-taking with full control over their data. Install via winget or use the winget command line for easy deployment on Windows systems.
Tolaria’s design prioritizes portability, flexibility, and ease of use, making it a reliable tool for personal productivity or team collaboration.
README
💧 Tolaria
Tolaria is a desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux for managing markdown knowledge bases. People use it for a variety of use cases:
Operate second brains and personal knowledge
Organize company docs as context for AI
Store OpenClaw/assistants memory and procedures
Personally, I use it to run my life (hey 👋 Luca here). I have a massive workspace of 10,000+ notes, which are the result of my Refactoring work + a ton of personal journaling and second braining.
Sponsors
Tolaria is supported by a small panel of tools that help keep the project healthy, tested, and ready for AI-assisted development. I use these tools every day.
📑 Files-first — Your notes are plain markdown files. They're portable, work with any editor, and require no export step. Your data belongs to you, not to any app.
🔌 Git-first — Every vault is a git repository. You get full version history, the ability to use any git remote, and zero dependency on Tolaria servers.
🛜 Offline-first, zero lock-in — No accounts, no subscriptions, no cloud dependencies. Your vault works completely offline and always will. If you stop using Tolaria, you lose nothing.
🔬 Open source — Tolaria is free and open source. I built this for myself and for sharing it with others.
📋 Standards-based — Notes are markdown files with YAML frontmatter. No proprietary formats, no locked-in data. Everything works with standard tools if you decide to move away from Tolaria.
🔍 Types as lenses, not schemas — Types in Tolaria are navigation aids, not enforcement mechanisms. There's no required fields, no validation, just helpful categories for finding notes.
🪄AI-first but not AI-only — A vault of files works very well with AI agents, but you are free to use whatever you want. We support Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Gemini CLI setup paths, but you can edit the vault with any AI you want. We provide an AGENTS file for your agents to figure out.
⌨️ Keyboard-first — Tolaria is designed for power-users who want to use keyboard as much as possible. A lot of how we designed the Editor and the Command Palette is based on this.
💪 Built from real use — Tolaria was created for manage my personal vault of 10,000+ notes, and I use it every day. Every feature exists because it solved a real problem.
Installation
Homebrew
Install via Homebrew on macOS:
brew install --cask tolaria
Download from releases
Download the latest release here for macOS, Windows, or Linux. Windows installers are Authenticode-signed; company-managed devices may still require IT approval of the Tolaria publisher before first install.
Getting started
When you open Tolaria for the first time you get the chance of cloning the getting started vault — which gives you a walkthrough of the whole app.
Tolaria is open source and built with Tauri, React, and TypeScript. If you want to run or contribute to the app locally, here is how to get started. You can also find the gist below 👇
Prerequisites
Node.js 20+
pnpm 8+
Rust stable
macOS or Linux for development
Linux system dependencies
Tauri 2 on Linux requires WebKit2GTK 4.1 and GTK 3:
The bundled MCP server still spawns the system node binary at runtime on Linux, so install Node from your distro package manager if you want the external AI tooling flow.
Quick start
pnpm install
pnpm dev
Open http://localhost:5173 for the browser-based mock mode, or run the native desktop app with:
