Tolaria - An Open-Source macOS App for Managing Markdown Knowledge Bases

Tolaria, a macOS desktop app for managing Markdown file-based knowledge bases, has been released. It's used for personal knowledge management and organizing company documents, and also targets AI context composition and assistant memory/procedure storage use cases.

The core design is as follows.

• files-first / Git-first: Notes are stored as plain Markdown files, and the vault is treated like a Git repository, ensuring portability and version history without separate exports.
• offline-first / zero lock-in: Works entirely offline with no accounts, subscriptions, or cloud dependencies.
• AI-first but not AI-only: Supports Claude Code and Codex CLI, and other AI tools can also directly edit the file-based vault. An AGENTS file is also provided.

The project describes its features as having been added while solving real-world problems encountered in a large workspace containing over 10,000 notes. It also emphasizes maintaining data ownership and long-term compatibility by using standard Markdown and YAML frontmatter.

The open-source implementation is based on Tauri, React, TypeScript, and documentation for local development is also provided. The latest app can be downloaded from GitHub releases, and on first launch, users can clone the getting started vault to follow the usage flow. The license is AGPL-3.0-or-later.