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

Haven't tried it, will take a look.

High level general purpose "IDE" for document editing (think Google Docs, Notion), that also exposes MCP/Skills for LLM wiki/second-brain scenarios.

Seems Rowboat is more focused on the personal assistant angle, we defer to your own agent (Claude, Codex, etc.) to do the LLM work.

The signature figure on the repo shows file contents alongside a chat window. Is this actually supported by the app? I can't figure out how to open a chat window in the app without handing off to an external AI app.

I really wanted to like this, but unfortunately couldn't see how it improves my experience over Obsidian or VS Code.

The fact that I have to juggle between OpenKnowledge and Codex to engage the AI, while also accepting a barebones Obsidian, is a real bummer. From what I can tell, you are saving me a few key strokes with moving prompts around. What I really want is the AI to live IN the app, like VS Code, and then move around the documents like it is Obsidian. I'll accept a plain terminal, but a pretty UI would feel like a better fit. My sense is that the new value add here is a set of skills and mcp servers, which probably already exist for Obsidian, or could more productively be spun up. I looked at the plugins again in Obsidian and found Claudian, which lets me bring my local models and Codex in the right pane. This is perfect, so sorry your app is not for me (yet), but thanks for getting me to look again at my tooling.

I want to throw my vote in for local models. Gemma4-31b is working well for me on these types of tasks, and not having an easy way to plug that in is a deal breaker. Embeddings should certainly have a local option, as they are cheap to compute. For what it is worth, I use LMStudio which supports OpenAI and Anthropic compatible api endpoints, so it should be easy to wire in.

A big caveat, I'm not trying to share my vault with other people, and I can see making that pain go away being worth switching. That said, I feel like you're targeting a weird market, where you want people technical enough to use LLMs and GitHub, but not so technical they can't customize a shared environment.

I would switch if the whole experience was self contained and "clean." Right now, it feels like a well dressed wrapper for pretty basic functionality.

Ack, thanks for feedback ! We're definitely looking at a more integrated experience.

Electron apps tend to fall down in the minutiae of the little things that native apps get right (around things like selection, scrolling, various small affordances across various levels). Would love to see something like this be more native app upfront, than starting out with something that will always leave that top 10% of what makes a nice feeling app unobtainable.

You win hard on this if you have the best possible UX that feels natural to drive. You just also ran if not because obsidian/notion etc. are already there (and have the people to put into those random edge cases that make electron apps bad).