Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 199 posts

Re: Show HN: OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion

#21

Post by engomez »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #18
engomez wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got it. MCP Server and CLI is agent-agnostic, so should work with local models/harnesses, but we'll look into more explicit docs around this. What IDE or harness do you use? We'll take a look.

Personally I just want to see more support for local LLMs. I haven't been doing much coding lately but am interested in setting up Qwen 3.6 if I can obtain the hardware

Agree same. We'll look into explicit guides and integrations with Zed // OpenCode as a starting point, they let you choose your model.

Re: Show HN: OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion

#24

Post by engomez »

culi wrote: post #22

I don't understand how Obsidian, a collection of markdown files, isn't already AI friendly. It's hard for me to imagine a more AI-friendly but still usable way to organize your notes.

What we did to go "beyond" is build in skills and an MCP server into the app, and auto-install those into e.g. Claude, Codex, and Cursor formats. Also added a web viewer so that e.g. Claude Desktop can open up the editor directly within it's embedded web viewer.

Re: Show HN: OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion

#25

Post by engomez »

vitorbaptistaa wrote: post #17

Congratulations on the launch. It looks neat! On a side note, I find it interesting that a few recent projects are going for the Open Knowledge name. The Open Knowledge Foundation ( https://okfn.org ) is one of the first/largest proponents of the open data movement (think of it as a Free Software Foundation but for data, not software). They started in 2004 and developed many of the open data licenses and widely used…

Biased but great name of course haha.

OKF timing was coincidence, we'd started I take it around the same time they'd started internally.

What's good is that everything is pretty open formats/source and complimentary.

Re: Show HN: OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion

#26

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

engomez wrote: post #23
beanjuiceII wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yea pass..

are you linux or windows? if linux, which distro? Electron support for distros varies so input is appreciated.

I recommend taking a look at appimages or flatpak within Linux if you wish to do so and if you do appimage, try to take an older system within a VM from my understanding as then you wouldn't have issues of glibc which I have sometimes heard. I'd be interested to help if that is of your interest.

Re: Show HN: OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion

#27

Post by coldbrewed »

engomez wrote: post #24
culi wrote: post #22

I don't understand how Obsidian, a collection of markdown files, isn't already AI friendly. It's hard for me to imagine a more AI-friendly but still usable way to organize your notes.

What we did to go "beyond" is build in skills and an MCP server into the app, and auto-install those into e.g. Claude, Codex, and Cursor formats. Also added a web viewer so that e.g. Claude Desktop can open up the editor directly within it's embedded web viewer.

Why not build skills and an MCP for markdown or obsidian? I'm using both at present and it's fine, bit would like to understand the differentiating factor here.

Re: Show HN: OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion

#29

Post by jfim »

engomez wrote: post #6
devCassius wrote: post #5

Is there a migration path from Obsidian or Notion? Switching costs are usually what keeps people locked in.

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.

Obsidian is a lot more than "just markdown" though.

For example, with the appropriate plugins like dataview and charts, it's possible to create dashboards, lists, and tables that update automatically based on data elements present in documents or documents themselves. I use it to have views over my to-do lists (daily routine items, tasks that are overdue, upcoming tasks, etc), make dashboards, and show lists of documents edited on a particular date.

I'd love to migrate away from Obsidian towards something that's not proprietary, but I haven't seen anything that allows querying other documents.

That doesn't mean it's a design direction that open knowledge should go in, but just a data point that reducing Obsidian vaults to "just markdown" misses what some users use it for.

Re: Show HN: OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion

#30

Post by engomez »

harikb wrote: post #28

Got this toast/notification message from your desktop app. > Added ok to your PATH — managed block in ~/.zshrc, ~/.config/fish/conf.d/open-knowledge.fish. Took a while to see that 'ok' is the name of your product.

Ack ! We made the shorthand for e.g. the CLI and .ok/ configuration folders. Shouldn't show up in the UX strings, we'll clean that up.
Post reply on HN