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Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

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Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#341
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too have vibe-coded my own personal obsidian/sublime replacement in rust, and also ran into WYSIWYG table editing and rendering issues with opus 4.7. Took a couple iterations but now formulas/rendering are perfect. GPT5.5 actually handled that very well compared to 4.7

I would love to hear more about this, did you use a GUI library? Does it perform well?

Not the one you're replying to, but "my" system is an Angular application that makes heavy use of CodeMirror.

One instance for the base editor, and one instance for the currently active cell. The other cells are rendered to HTML through a different code path (no CodeMirror involved there).

For rendering mathematical formulas it uses MathJax.

A global context-based keyboard handler such as the one in VSCode allows for Emacs key bindings.

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free to download, free to use, free to share, no data collection of any kind, but closed source. A full 1:1 native clone would be too much to build without funding. Plugin/theme/api compatibility, canvas, bases, sync, and all the small Obsidian edge cases would make it a much larger project. Without sponsorship or some sustainable funding model, AI'd focus first on the native markdown editor/vault part: local files,…

Free to download, free to use, closed source - for that we already have Obsidian...

> for that we already have Obsidian...

Wasting 300mb ram to show static text, Wordpad does the same in 13mb ram but sadly it lacks markdown support.

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#343
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too have vibe-coded my own personal obsidian/sublime replacement in rust, and also ran into WYSIWYG table editing and rendering issues with opus 4.7. Took a couple iterations but now formulas/rendering are perfect. GPT5.5 actually handled that very well compared to 4.7

I would love to hear more about this, did you use a GUI library? Does it perform well?

Sure! At first I wanted a sublime that played nice on windows with virtual desktops (it has some annoyances when dragging tabs, they dont respect separate destkops). I use sublime as my 'ephemeral' text editor, and Obsidian for my actual saved/persisted notes, but i love Obsidian's WYSIWYG markdown experience so i wanted to bake that into this as well.

So the core ethos of it is: 1. ephemeral AND safe - easy to jot notes but also safe from crash or accidental closing ( all text buffers persist a rewindable history), 2. performance, 3. minimalism: I don't want a whole plugin ecosystem or bloat. extra features are all accessed via the command palette, 4. markdown WYSIWYG rendering tailored to my liking

Technical details: Native markdown notes editor for Windows, written in Rust. No GUI library as I went straight to raw Win32 with DirectWrite/Direct2D/D3D11 underneath. No winit, no wgpu, no async. Just a real wndproc and threads talking over crossbeam channels. The rope is canonical and there's a separate "display map" layer that handles wrapping, folding, hide/replace projections.

source bytes never touch the GPU and every text layout is built from a display string with styles baked in. SQLite is the source of truth and the files on disk are exports, so every keystroke is durable

Performance is the whole point as I wanted sublime-level performance(and beyond) There are gated budgets in CI for every slice, eg. keystroke to pixel under 8ms p99, decoration parse under 1ms, D2D submission under 2ms, edit-to-durable under 400ms, plus a variance-tail contract (p99.9 ≤ 2× p99) so sporadic stalls fail the build too. Steady-state target is zero new heap allocations per keystroke. Layout caches are keyed so they survive typing bursts, the display map has splice + motion-reuse caches that killed O(document) rebuilds on single-character edits and caret moves, and every reflow funnels through a helper that pins the caret's screen-y so font/wrap/resize changes never make you re-find your cursor.

I've also done a bit of research on the psychology of perception and response times to try to tune this for maximum intuitiveness and responsiveness. Too fast is disconcerting, too slow is infuriating, too little feedback is confusing, too much is distractinc, etc.

this has taken about a week so far and it's almost ready to replace my usage of sublime

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#344
post #149

AI'm building a native version[0] of Obsidian in Qt6 (QWidgets, cpp), replicating the markdown editor takes a while, there are so many ways of corrupting the file or losing the rendered markdown style... but its getting there[1] and its lightweight, using about 15mb ram, no gpu and barely uses any cpu when the cursor or scroll moves, like a text editor should be. Still need to render widget tables, lists and syntax h…

I open sourced https://asnotes.io - it's markdown based with wikilinking, task management, a kanban board and static site publishing. It runs locally and is Git friendly. The aim was to build something using formats and tech that is likely to stand the test of time.

Awww... It's a plugin for VSCode. I've long since moved to Zed and don't want to wrangle multiple editors :(

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#345
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because web browsers support hyperlinking there is no need to embed everything into one big html file

And markdown does also support hyperlinks, like HTML. So it makes sense to use that feature.

But the comment above asked for support for a feature that allows to embed images inside markdown, hence my reply

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone feels comfortable running third-party opaque code in their computers.

Most people paying money for software do, though.

Which is why I think Obsidian is such a weird piece of software. It's free. It doesn't lock your own data behind a paywall. But, it only allows you to modify it in very specific plugin API ways. I pay for software all the time, and I don't expect it to be open source. But for software I don't pay for, I do expect it to be open source.

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people paying money for software do, though.

Which is why I think Obsidian is such a weird piece of software. It's free. It doesn't lock your own data behind a paywall. But, it only allows you to modify it in very specific plugin API ways. I pay for software all the time, and I don't expect it to be open source. But for software I don't pay for, I do expect it to be open source.

On the other hand, that may be part of the reason why Obsidian has such a rich plugin ecosystem. Perhaps there is less of an incentive to build a good plugin API if you can just tell people to fork instead.

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#348
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why I think Obsidian is such a weird piece of software. It's free. It doesn't lock your own data behind a paywall. But, it only allows you to modify it in very specific plugin API ways. I pay for software all the time, and I don't expect it to be open source. But for software I don't pay for, I do expect it to be open source.

On the other hand, that may be part of the reason why Obsidian has such a rich plugin ecosystem. Perhaps there is less of an incentive to build a good plugin API if you can just tell people to fork instead.

Emacs and vim don't suffer from the "I'll fork it to make my pet feature" problem. Why would Obsidian?

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#349
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, that may be part of the reason why Obsidian has such a rich plugin ecosystem. Perhaps there is less of an incentive to build a good plugin API if you can just tell people to fork instead.

Emacs and vim don't suffer from the "I'll fork it to make my pet feature" problem. Why would Obsidian?

The two are not mutually exclusive?

Re: Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian

#350
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs and vim don't suffer from the "I'll fork it to make my pet feature" problem. Why would Obsidian?

The two are not mutually exclusive?

That's fair. And vim and Emacs have been forked in the past, so you may be on to something there. But, I still expect my editor to be open source. I might be weird like that though.
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