This site is a work in progress — still shipping new things every week

SideNotes

A quiet, local-first second brain for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Notion-easy block editor, Obsidian-deep linking. Notes stay as plain markdown on your machine — no cloud, no account, no lock-in.

2026

ElectronReact 18TypeScriptViteTipTapSigma + GraphologyReact FlowZustandTailwind

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About the project

SideNotes is a desktop second brain that pairs a Notion-style block editor with Obsidian-style wikilinks, a graph view, and a spatial canvas — all backed by plain markdown files on your filesystem. Key Features: • Block editor — TipTap with slash menu, drag handles, code blocks with syntax highlighting, and image paste/drop. Saves as markdown on every keystroke. • Wikilinks & mentions — type [[ for note autocomplete, @ for a unified picker (notes, tags, dates), # for tags. Backlinks panel always visible. • Connections graph — Sigma + WebGL graph of every wikilink in the vault, coloured by folder, with hover highlighting and a "Focus on this note" mode. • Canvas — React Flow whiteboard for spatial thinking. Drag notes from the sidebar to embed them as live cards. Saves as .canvas JSON (Obsidian-compatible). • Daily notes — date masthead, mood strip, and "yesterday's loose ends" auto-pulled from the previous day. ⌘D opens today. • Tables that actually grow — floating toolbar to add/remove rows or columns, toggle the header row, or resize columns by dragging. • Markdown source view — one-click flip between rendered preview and raw markdown for power users. • Six themes — Paper, Ink, Forest, Dusk, Carbon, Rose. Each in light + dark, CSS-variable driven so editor, graph, and canvas all change at once. • Local-first — your vault is just a folder of .md files. Move it to iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or Syncthing for sync. The app doesn't run a sync service. • Export to PDF, HTML, or plain markdown. • Onboarding tour, daily tips, and full shortcuts cheatsheet — opens on first launch and any time after via ⌘K or ⌘/. Ships as a notarized .dmg for macOS, NSIS .exe for Windows, and .AppImage + .deb for Linux. Tagged releases build all three OSes in parallel via GitHub Actions.

Story

I kept bouncing between Notion and Obsidian and resenting both. Notion has the editor I want — slash menu, drag handles, tables that aren't a fight — but every note lives in a database I don't own. Obsidian respects that notes should be plain markdown on disk, but the editor never quite clicked for me and the plugin sprawl turns simple things into yak shaves. So I built the version I actually wanted to use. SideNotes is an Electron app with a TipTap block editor sitting on top of a folder of .md files. Wikilinks, backlinks, a Sigma + WebGL graph of every connection in the vault, and a React Flow canvas for spatial thinking. The file format is fully Obsidian-compatible — point it at an existing vault and it just works. The details I cared about: the editor and the graph and the canvas all share one CSS-variable theme system, so flipping between Paper, Forest, Carbon, Rose, etc. retints everything at once. Saves are debounced and watcher-aware — if you edit a file externally (Git pull, another editor, sync conflict), the app reloads instead of silently overwriting your changes. Daily notes auto-pull yesterday's open todos so you actually close loops. Ships as a real desktop app — notarized .dmg for macOS, NSIS .exe for Windows, AppImage + .deb for Linux — all built in parallel from a single GitHub Actions release workflow. Currently using it daily as my main notes app. It's the project I'm most proud of.

Screenshots