OpenNote

A block-based, AI-powered note-taking app with semantic search — built entirely in Rust.

Status: Heavy Development — APIs, architecture, and workflows are evolving quickly. Contributions, feedback, and experimental use are all welcome.

Features

• Keyword and semantic search — find notes instantly, or let your documents answer your questions.
• Fully local — everything runs on your machine. Your data stays private.
• Self-host server — you can opt to run a self-hosted server to sync data across all of your devices with encrypted communications.
• WYSIWYG Markdown Editor — editor and render your markdown in real-time.
• Blazing fast — built for performance from the ground up.

Roadmap

• Self-hosted server for syncing documents across devices with encrypted communications
• WYSIWYG markdown editor integration
• Advanced NLP features to simplify document management (e.g., automatic categorization by semantic similarity)
• LLM integrations — local-first, always
• MCP server support
• Import webpages, databases and files
• Multi-modal support

Getting Started

1. Visit the Releases page.
2. Download the archive for your operating system.
3. Unzip the archive.
4. Double-click to launch the app.
5. Enjoy!

For mac users: I don't have an Apple Developer Account yet, so I can't codesign the mac app. You may need to run the following command in Terminal, after pasting the app file to the Applications folder:

For first-time installation: The app will try downloading models--sentence-transformers--all-MiniLM-L6-v2 from https://huggingface.co by default. However, in case if the official site fails, it will switch to use a mirror site, which is https://hf-mirror.com.

sudo xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/opennote.app

Configure the Desktop App

You can configure OpenNote with its configurations.json. It can be found here:

# on macOS
"/Users/yourusername/Library/Application Support/opennote/configurations.json"

# on Linux
"/home/yourusername/.config/opennote/configurations.json"

# on Windows
"C:\Users\Alice\AppData\Roaming\opennote\configurations.json"

However, you may also open the configuration editor by pressing CMD + ; on macOS, or Ctrl + ; on Windows and Linux.

Setup Remote Server

You may host a remote server for syncing across different computers securely. To achieve this, refer to README.md of opennote-server.

Use the MCP Server

The MCP server is enabled by default and listens on http://localhost:8080/. Toggle it and change its address in configurations.json under user.mcp_server, or open the configuration editor with Cmd + ; on macOS / Ctrl + ; on Windows and Linux:

{
  "mcp_server": {
    "enabled": true, // start the MCP server when the app launches (default `true`)
    "host": "localhost", // address the server binds to (default `localhost:8080`)
    "port": 8080,
    "workers": 2 // number of actix-web worker threads (default `2`)
  }
}

Point any MCP client that supports the Streamable HTTP transport at the server's URL. For example, add this to your client's MCP configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "opennote": {
      "url": "http://localhost:8080/"
    }
  }
}

The server is loopback-only by default: it accepts requests whose Host header is a loopback address, which protects the locally running server from DNS-rebinding attacks. It is intended to be used from the same machine that runs OpenNote. The desktop MCP server does not require authentication.

Contributing

OpenNote is in active development and welcomes contributions of all kinds — bug reports, feature ideas, code, documentation, and design.

• Open issues and pull requests on GitHub
• Explore the crate documentation in the source
• Reach out with questions or ideas

Credits

Kudos to all the libraries used in this project. See the full list in Cargo.toml and in the Cargo.toml of each sub-crate.

Thanks to appify for bundling the executable as a macOS app.

Thanks to sqlite for localizing relational database.

Thanks to sqlite-vector for localizing vector storages.

Thanks to velotype for WYSIWYG markdown editor.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

This project includes code derived from Zed under the Apache 2.0 license — see NOTICE.md.