mdSilo

A hub for your personal I/O: Reading → Issue → Writing.

mdSilo is a local-first workspace where what you read, what you think and what you write live together, linked, searchable and yours. It is a Markdown notebook, a book reader, a feed reader and an issue tracker in one small app (React + Tauri), on top of plain files.

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Why mdSilo

For a human brain, reading and writing are the I/O: the way a thinking system talks with the world. Most note apps only care about the last step, the writing. But writing without reading is empty, and what you read is gone in a week if there is no place to digest it.

So mdSilo is built around the whole loop, and gives each step its own tool:

	Step	Tool	In mdSilo
📖	Reading (input)	Reader, Feeds, Podcasts	Books (EPUB, PDF, MOBI, FB2, CBZ...), RSS/Atom/JSON Feed, podcasts and clipped web pages; highlight and annotate anything
🧩	Issue (process)	Issues, Projects	A GitHub-like tracker for the questions, ideas and tasks that reading raises: labels, milestones, boards
✍️	Writing (output)	WYSIWYG Markdown editor	Notes, a personal wiki, mind maps, diagrams, math

And links close the loop: a note links to a book ({{Alice's Adventures in Wonderland}}), to a sentence in it, to an issue ([@3](issue:3)) and to other notes ([[Philosophy]]). Every link is two-way, and the Graph draws the whole network.

Everything is a plain file in a folder you choose: Markdown for notes and annotations, JSON for issues and the library. No account, no server, no lock-in; sync it with git right from the app (or with anything else), and publish the notes you choose as a website.

Features

📖 Read: the input

• Book reader for EPUB, PDF, MOBI/AZW3, FB2 and CBZ; TXT, Markdown and HTML are converted on import. Paging or scrolling, themes, fonts, margins, footnotes, image and table viewer
• Highlight, write notes, bookmark: kept as a Markdown file next to the book (Foo.epub.md), a note like any other: editable, searchable, linkable
• Look up as you read: your dictionaries in your order (Wiktionary, Wikipedia, Urban Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, sites you add, MDict files), with pronunciations, in books and notes; translation, read aloud
• Vocabulary: words kept with their pronunciation and the sentence they came from, studied as flash cards; the word lens shows their meaning under them in the books
• Parallel reading: two books side by side, each with its own notes
• Library: covers, groups, status, search, drag and drop; books are identified by content, so a renamed book is still the same book
• Feeds & podcasts: RSS/Atom/JSON Feed client with full text, starred articles, clipping to notes and a podcast player; turn a channel into an EPUB and read a month of news as a book

🧩 Process: Issue

• Issues with labels, milestones, due dates, subtasks, comments and a timeline, plus a GitHub-style filter (is:open label:question sort:due)
• Projects: Kanban boards and tables, with any statuses you want (To read → Reading → Digesting → Written up)
• Born where the thought is: select a sentence in a book or a note and choose New issue of it; the quote and a link back become the issue
• Tasks in notes: - [ ] checkboxes and #todo# #doing# #done# tags are collected in one list and can become issues that stay in sync

✍️ Write: the output

• All-in-one editor: WYSIWYG, raw Markdown and Mind Map views of the same file
• Markdown and more: tables, task lists, ==highlight==, math and chemistry (KaTeX), notices, mermaid / echarts / abc music, chemical structures (SMILES), code highlighting, embeds, attachments
• Slash commands, a hovering toolbar and hotkeys: never leave the keyboard
• Export to PDF and PNG

🔗 Link and see

• Bidirectional links: [[notes]], {{books and highlights}}, [@12](issue:12), #tags#, backlinks and unlinked mentions
• Graph: notes, books, issues and tags in one network
• Chronicle: daily journals and a GitHub-like activity heat map of your writing and reading
• Full-text search over notes, annotations and the text of your books, Chinese included
• Dark and light, 10 themes; Windows, macOS, Linux and Web; free and open source

🔄 Sync and publish

• Git sync with GitHub, Gitea, GitLab or any git host over HTTPS with a token: commit, pull and push in one click, every few minutes or when the app closes. Books sync only if you choose; the token stays on the device
• No lost edits: changes on two devices merge; when both changed the same lines, your version is kept beside the note as a conflict copy, and the app's data merges field by field
• Publish a static site to GitHub Pages (or export it to a folder): the folders you tick, with backlinks, graph, search, tag pages, book annotations and issues with their milestones and boards. Math, mermaid, echarts and SMILES are drawn as you publish; links to private notes become plain text

🛠️ Plugins and customization

Make mdSilo your own: add your own fonts for reading and writing, define a color theme, and extend the app with plugins. some plugins here you can try out: https://github.com/mdSilo/mdSilo-app/tree/main/examples/plugins

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗