About

Notes should outlive the tools that read them.

Commonplace is built around a simple premise: your notes are plain Markdown files on your machine, and the app is a viewer, editor, and indexer on top of them. Nothing about the experience requires a backend, an account, or a cloud.

Why this exists

A reaction to note tools that promise portability and quietly take it back.

A lot of note apps start with the right pitch: "your data is yours." Then they pick a proprietary format, or a server-side database, or a vendor-only sync, and over time the pitch turns into a billing pitch.

Commonplace inverts that. The vault is just a folder of .md files. If Commonplace disappeared tomorrow, you could open every note in any text editor, ship it through any sync tool, grep it like any other folder, and keep going. The .commonplace/ index is a cache — it can always be rebuilt from your Markdown.

The project is also a way to take some of the better ideas in this space — wiki links, backlinks, graphs, semantic similarity — and make them feel like they belong to a calm, local, single-user product instead of a SaaS dashboard.

Philosophy

The principles that drive every design call. When in doubt, these win.

Principle

Local-first

Default to no network. Sync, embeddings, and any other "smart" features are opt-in, explicit, and run against tools you already trust.

Principle

Markdown is the contract

Notes are plain .md files in a folder you control. Indices, embeddings, and workspace state are derived data that can always be rebuilt.

Principle

Bring your own sync

No native sync engine. Put the vault inside Syncthing, iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Git, or whatever else you already use — the file-watcher reconciles external edits safely.

Principle

Quiet by default

The interface should feel like a workspace, not a dashboard. No popups, no nags, no live-counters competing for attention.

Principle

Safe by construction

The renderer is untrusted relative to the main process. Markdown preview blocks unsafe URLs and scripts. Filesystem operations flow through a path-safety guard.

Principle

Open by default

MIT licensed. Documented architecture. Hand-written changelog. The shipped product and the public roadmap are the same artifact.

What this isn't

Saying no to things is part of the design.

Not a backend SaaS. There is no server to log into, nothing to authenticate against.
Not an accounts product. No sign-up, no profile, no email.
Not a native cloud-sync service. Sync is a folder you put in a tool you already trust.
Not a real-time collaboration tool. Commonplace is single-user by design today.
Not a database-first note model. Markdown files are the truth; SQLite is a cache.

FAQ

The questions that show up most often.

How is this different from Obsidian / Logseq / etc.?

Conceptually similar in that the vault is a folder of Markdown. The differences are in posture: Commonplace ships a much smaller surface area, is MIT licensed, explicitly avoids a plugin marketplace as a feature distribution mechanism, and treats the SQLite index as a transparent rebuildable cache rather than a hidden proprietary store.

Does it sync between my devices?

Not natively. The recommendation is to put your vault folder inside a sync tool you already use — Syncthing, iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive for Desktop, OneDrive, Nextcloud, or a Git repository. The watcher handles external edits with a stale-note banner and a conflict-safe save path.

Is anything sent to a server?

No. There's no server to send to. The marketing site is a static deploy on Cloudflare Pages with no analytics or tracking. The browser app loads its bundle and then operates entirely against your local folder or local browser storage.

What about AI / semantic search?

Commonplace ships a semantic scaffold today: a chunker, an EmbeddingProvider interface, SQLite-backed storage, and a Related Notes panel. The default provider is a deterministic placeholder — useful as plumbing, not a real model. A real local embedding provider is in progress; the plan is Ollama-over-localhost first, then narrower fallbacks, so nothing has to leave your machine.

Which browsers work best?

Chrome and Edge on desktop give you the full local-folder experience via the File System Access API. Firefox, Safari, and unsupported environments fall back to a browser-local demo mode that stores notes in localStorage. Import / export keeps that data portable.

Can I contribute?

Yes. The repository is on GitHub. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md and the roadmap. Issues and pull requests welcome.

What's the license?

MIT. See LICENSE.

Relevant links

Everything you'd want to dig deeper or get involved.

GitHub repository Source, issues, releases, full commit history. Latest desktop release macOS, Windows, and Linux builds. Browser app No install — try it against a folder you own. Technical overview Stack, runtime modes, IPC, security, semantic memory. Changelog Running log of phases, features, and fixes. Roadmap What's shipped, what's in progress, what's planned. Contributing How to get a patch into main. MIT License Permissively licensed, no strings.