Hi HN, Nick here, founder at Inkeep. We’re launching OpenKnowledge, a “what you see is what you get” markdown editor that has direct integrations with Claude, Codex, and Cursor. Available as MacOS app or CLI. Fully free/local and OSS (https://github.com/inkeep/open-knowledge).
We built this because we wanted a “Google docs” like experience for writing and sharing markdown files across our team. Obsidian is the best alternative we tried, but found it doesn’t have a true “what you see is what you get” UI and it didn’t integrate well with Claude/Codex outside of community plugins.
So we built OpenKnowledge. It takes shape as:
1. A MacOS app with a file navigator, the WYSIWYG editor, and link explorer.
2. Integrations with the Claude, Codex, and Cursor desktop apps. The agents can open an OpenKnowledge editor within their embedded web browsers for a side-by-side experience.
3. Built-in mcps, skills, and RAG for LLM-wiki and “AI Second Brain” scenarios + spec writing
4. An embedded terminal and CLI for TUI-first users
On the architecture side, the interesting eng. challenges included:
1. A pipeline to convert ProseMirror to markdown in a bidirectional lossless way. ProseMirror uses ASTs, which are not designed to have byte-fidelity.
2. A dual-observer CRDT to keep the ProseMirror and markdown state in-sync.
The CRDT + git also power a collaborative experience that shows what Agents are doing in the markdown, have undo/redo, and version history. The “Share” and cloud-sync functionality are geared for team collaboration. They feel “no-code” but leverage git/GitHub under the hood, which also means data stays fully private.
In that spirit, we made OpenKnowledge open source for anybody who’s curious or who’d like to contribute.
We’re actively thinking about plugins/extensibility and what’s next. If you have suggestions or feedback, would love to hear it.
claudiacsf•1h ago
I'm a sucker for pretty UIs. I already have a company-mandated knowledge base tool, Slite, can they be used together?
engomez•1h ago
Looking into Slite now to check. With OpenKnowledge, the content is just markdown files on-disk, so there shouldn't be anything exclusionary about it. Not sure how/if Slite handles markdown files. Will take a look.
engomez•51m ago
tl;dr: Slite supports import/export Markdown files, so not a native "interop".
Recommend trying it for some personal notes/specs/etc. -- can be used independently.
devCassius•1h ago
Is there a migration path from Obsidian or Notion? Switching costs are usually what keeps people locked in.
engomez•1h ago
Since Obsidian is just markdown, you can just open an Obsidian vault with OpenKnowledge. We made it so that most Obsidian syntax is supported, like wikilinks.
For Notion, we don't have a migration tool, but you can try the export to markdown approach.
Recommend trying it to get a feel, and if are looking to migrate and facing friction let me know details.
engomez•1h ago
We built this because we wanted a “Google docs” like experience for writing and sharing markdown files across our team. Obsidian is the best alternative we tried, but found it doesn’t have a true “what you see is what you get” UI and it didn’t integrate well with Claude/Codex outside of community plugins.
So we built OpenKnowledge. It takes shape as:
1. A MacOS app with a file navigator, the WYSIWYG editor, and link explorer.
2. Integrations with the Claude, Codex, and Cursor desktop apps. The agents can open an OpenKnowledge editor within their embedded web browsers for a side-by-side experience.
3. Built-in mcps, skills, and RAG for LLM-wiki and “AI Second Brain” scenarios + spec writing
4. An embedded terminal and CLI for TUI-first users
OSS stack includes: Tiptap/prosemirror, CodeMirror, yjs (CRDT), Electron (MacOS app), Orama, remark/rehype/micromark/mdast, @pierre/trees
On the architecture side, the interesting eng. challenges included:
1. A pipeline to convert ProseMirror to markdown in a bidirectional lossless way. ProseMirror uses ASTs, which are not designed to have byte-fidelity.
2. A dual-observer CRDT to keep the ProseMirror and markdown state in-sync.
The CRDT + git also power a collaborative experience that shows what Agents are doing in the markdown, have undo/redo, and version history. The “Share” and cloud-sync functionality are geared for team collaboration. They feel “no-code” but leverage git/GitHub under the hood, which also means data stays fully private.
In that spirit, we made OpenKnowledge open source for anybody who’s curious or who’d like to contribute.
We’re actively thinking about plugins/extensibility and what’s next. If you have suggestions or feedback, would love to hear it.
claudiacsf•1h ago
engomez•1h ago
engomez•51m ago
Links: https://slite.slite.page/p/5XOO7_tII0D87T/Importing-Files, https://slite.slite.page/p/PxKfPvLrLHj07O/Exporting-Your-Doc...
Recommend trying it for some personal notes/specs/etc. -- can be used independently.