Oh hey I’ve been looking for “obsidian but with version history “ for a bit now.
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
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Give HelixNotes a try :)
Your website says "No sync. No lock-in. No bullshit"
Would you mind elaborating on the thought there? Why no sync?
I use obsidian with self hosted live sync, my notes are mine and they live on my hardware, but they are always in sync between my devices. If I'm on my desktop and take notes, I can pull them up on my laptop or even my phone. With this, I can't reference my notes (or update them) until I'm back on my desktop.
The line "No sync. No lock-in. No bullshit" tells me you're opposed to it on principal, meaning you don't intend to ever add the ability to sync, and that's a nonstarter for me and a lot of people I image. I'd love to migrate from obsidian to something open source, and I'd love to potentially spend time working on contributing a self hosted live sync like feature, but I need to know if my work and pull request will be immediately rejected on a principal I'm not sure I understand?
I assume you could use syncthing to sync the notes.
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Never worked with any note taking apps except for Vim with customized snippets and rudamentary helper scripts.
While such an app seems very appealing, I haven't seen any of them featuring the useful stuff, such as pluggable editor (in my case Vim or NeoVim), template support (day journal, meeting, README etc...), rendered fields (e.g.: today, author, or arbitrary values), support for pandoc rendering, doc metadata management (tags, keywords, related docs, links) or markers in text eg. @TODO etc... (idea being to aut. create lists of paragraps with such markers)
What's the point of a note taking app that provides help with editing single docs and maybe with rendering to HTML, but doesn't help organizing and remembering stuff?
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Isn't this basically just an Obsidian replacement then? I haven't tried it, but reading the info in Codeberg does point to that.
Looks like an interesting project!
Could you please consider publishing it to Flathub?
It's on the list. Flatpak packaging is coming.
Not the developer, though that could be an option for sure. I'd highly recommend looking at the security holes for Flatpak, and it's got a ton of them. They're getting fixed, though I don't even have Flatpak installed on my machine.
Are there security issues specific to Flatpak? I would have thought it'd be more secure than Appimage, since it's sandboxed.
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I've been hearing people suggest staying away from flatpaks, but I haven't heard the reasons why. I guess that's it?
Does this have multi vault support?
Not yet, but it's a straightforward feature to add. Open an issue on Codeberg and I'll get it on the roadmap.
Very nice. The screenshots look promising!
MacDown is pretty solid, but I've been looking at alternatives. Unfortunately, while MarkText may be feature-rich, latency is untenable. I think that one's an Electron app.
Thanks! Latency was one of the main reasons I went with Tauri instead of Electron. HelixNotes launches instantly and stays light. Give it a try.
Plugin support?
Not at this stage. It's something I'm considering but the priority is getting the core experience right first.
Totally understandable at this stage. As soon as it appears on the roadmap I'm in. Need my templater :)
Mac user her. I've been using Markflowy after MacDown stopped development. I will give this a shot.
Thank you for your work.
Hi OP. I am really enjoying using HelixNotes.
I love the way it looks and all the features. I was able to use the same folder I use MarkFlowy and Marknote.
My only critique is the Ctrl key in Windows and Linux menu shortcuts is usually changed to Cmd for Mac. It really isn't a big deal but I think a lot of Mac users will notice this instantly. I tried creating an note with Cmd + N since is the default for all other Mac apps. I saw the Shortcuts in the Info section and I was hoping you could customize the Keyboard Shortcuts, but you can't.
It isn't a big deal with me. So far I am enjoying this more than MarkFlowy and Marknote. If you don't change for whatever reason, I understand and I will continue to use your HelixNotes.
Again thank you for your work.
Me again. Last time tonight, I promise.
My favorite features so far, making the edit toolbar disappear in source mode and Focus mode. Quick access is also really useful.
One more thing I don't like, it was adding a header to my edited notes.
Example:
***
id: "9242199e-992b-4c58-9b4f-85a6949d424d"
title: "Books"
tags: []
pinned: false
created: 2026-02-15T04:32:13.600656+00:00
modified: 2026-02-15T04:32:17.240423+00:00
***
This doesn't look great in MacOS preview. This might be one of those things that it was simplest to just add this directly to the file rather than creating some kind of database or a bunch of dot files. Again, not a deal breaker for me. Would adding it to the bottom be possible instead?
Thank you.
Really appreciate the detailed feedback.
You're right about the Mac shortcuts - Cmd should replace Ctrl on macOS. That's a bug, I'll fix it.
As for the frontmatter - Jayjader is correct, it's standard markdown frontmatter. It's how HelixNotes tracks metadata without using a database or sidecar files. Moving it to the bottom would break compatibility with every other markdown tool that reads frontmatter. But I understand it's not pretty in a plain preview - that's the tradeoff for keeping everything in plain .md files with no hidden database.
Glad you're enjoying it. Keep the feedback coming, this is exactly what helps improve the app.
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Since this looks to be similar to Obsidian, why not name it something else like it, but without the Obsidian name?
I'll need to do some numerology on that....
EDIT: On the note of Obsidian, my producer and I use it all the time, however, there is another one that someone in a community I'm in looked at, that being Trilium Next. Judging by the looks, it's got similarities to Trilium, which is actually pretty nice.
The name comes from the double helix. Structured but flexible, like how notes should be. Trilium is a solid project, but it stores notes in an SQLite database and runs on Electron. HelixNotes keeps everything as plain .md files and uses Tauri, so much lighter on resources.
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