Frostnotes

A notes app in the spirit of Obsidian, from Frostyard. Notes are plain markdown files with YAML frontmatter, in a folder you own (roadmap).

• notesd is a Go daemon that owns your vaults: it watches the files, keeps a SQLite index (full text, links, backlinks, tags, properties), and never writes over an edit it has not seen.
• Sync is built in. Each device syncs with a self-hosted hub, the same notesd in a hub role, which keeps every revision and merges concurrent edits. No conflict copies.
• The desktop app is Tauri v2 with a React UI and a CodeMirror 6 editor with live preview, a sibling of Frostmail.
• The web app is the same UI, served by lodge, frostyard's tailnet-only web shell, with Obsidian's phone layout on a narrow screen.
• Agents search, read and write notes through MCP: notesctl mcp locally, or lodge's /mcp/notes with a scoped token.
• Obsidian vaults open as they are: wikilinks, embeds, tags, callouts and properties.

Pre-release. M0 (foundations) and M1 (the headless vault) are done. Sync (M2) and the desktop app (M3) are built and in their 7-day trials, through 2026-10-24 and 2026-10-25. M4, notes inside lodge, is in progress: notesd runs as lodge's notes app, and the hub moves behind lodge from 2026-10-26. See the roadmap.

Try it

make build                              # build/notesd and build/notesctl
build/notesd &                          # the daemon; one per user
build/notesctl vault add ~/Notes        # registering never writes to the vault
build/notesctl search quince
claude mcp add frostnotes -- "$PWD/build/notesctl" mcp   # or: mcp --read-only

Every write, an agent's included, is kept as a version for 30 days: notesctl versions PATH lists them and notesctl revert undoes one.

Develop

Requirements: Go 1.27 and mise install (golangci-lint) on the host; nsl for the app toolchain.

nsl create frostnotes --distro debian:13
nsl run -m frostnotes --root bash dev/nsl/provision.sh "$(id -un)"
make check          # host: generated files, vet, lint, unit tests
make ui-check       # nsl: Biome, typecheck and UI tests
make app-run        # nsl: notesd plus the built app
make ui-dev         # nsl: notesd and Vite; open http://127.0.0.1:5173

make help lists every target. Architecture starts at docs/design/overview.md; agents start at AGENTS.md.

License

MIT.