Thank you for sharing this! It would be helpful if you could expand more on the differentiation with Obsidian. To my initial reading, most of the features you mention seem to be similar to well-established Obsidian patterns. For example, types, while not a native concept in Obsidian per-se, are often implemented by users using a "category" property (or something similar), and views seem quite similar to Obsidian bases and/or dataview. Git integration, tho dependent on a plugin, is also quite mature on Obsidian. I am not trying to diminish your efforts; I very much appreciate that Tolaria is open source (which Obsidian is not), and I am excited to see new PKMs. It would just be helpful to understand better your differentiation, since Obsidian seems to have become a somewhat dominant player in this space.
Hi Gregory! Obsidian has a ton of plugins so there is nothing you can strictly "not do" with it. But it's very different when these things are baked into the primary UX of the app as first-class citizens, vs they are added on top.
Tolaria is optimized for types, relationships, Git, and so on — doesn't only "support" them. But it's one of those things you need to try to understand!
It's like saying why should you use e.g. Linear for software engineering tasks, when you can do everything with Trello and a few extensions? Technically you can do everything with Trello, but if you are invested in the workflow that Linear is optimized for, the usability is very different.
because I wanted 1) a different UX that helped create relationships, properties, and types (which I believe benefit both humans and AI), and 2) first-class git support for sync
more generally, if your codebase and approach starts spreading, would be super interested in hearing your thoughts on tolaria acting as a "client/node" in a distributed collaborative knowledge making network like https://lichen.wiki/wiki/welcome-to-lichen
Really awesome, really believe this can become an amazing open source big ecosystem for private notes / braindumps. Maybe will spend some time myself to see how a mobile small version could work for my brain dumps on the road.
Thank you for sharing this! It would be helpful if you could expand more on the differentiation with Obsidian. To my initial reading, most of the features you mention seem to be similar to well-established Obsidian patterns. For example, types, while not a native concept in Obsidian per-se, are often implemented by users using a "category" property (or something similar), and views seem quite similar to Obsidian bases and/or dataview. Git integration, tho dependent on a plugin, is also quite mature on Obsidian. I am not trying to diminish your efforts; I very much appreciate that Tolaria is open source (which Obsidian is not), and I am excited to see new PKMs. It would just be helpful to understand better your differentiation, since Obsidian seems to have become a somewhat dominant player in this space.
Hi Gregory! Obsidian has a ton of plugins so there is nothing you can strictly "not do" with it. But it's very different when these things are baked into the primary UX of the app as first-class citizens, vs they are added on top.
Tolaria is optimized for types, relationships, Git, and so on — doesn't only "support" them. But it's one of those things you need to try to understand!
It's like saying why should you use e.g. Linear for software engineering tasks, when you can do everything with Trello and a few extensions? Technically you can do everything with Trello, but if you are invested in the workflow that Linear is optimized for, the usability is very different.
builds and runs on Linux :-)
Why not obsidian?
because I wanted 1) a different UX that helped create relationships, properties, and types (which I believe benefit both humans and AI), and 2) first-class git support for sync
curious what you think about this plugin we're building (before i knew about your project, which is awesome!): https://discoursegraphs.com/docs/obsidian/welcome/getting-started
more generally, if your codebase and approach starts spreading, would be super interested in hearing your thoughts on tolaria acting as a "client/node" in a distributed collaborative knowledge making network like https://lichen.wiki/wiki/welcome-to-lichen
isn't lichen just a wiki that uses AT Protocol for hosting? or does each contributor to a given wiki host their own edits?
Awesome!
What would it take to make a windows version for my mandatory work windows PC? 😇
already there in "alpha"! https://github.com/refactoringhq/tolaria/releases/tag/stable-v2026.4.25
Really awesome, really believe this can become an amazing open source big ecosystem for private notes / braindumps. Maybe will spend some time myself to see how a mobile small version could work for my brain dumps on the road.
Can I migrate an Obsidian vault?
How will you say it differs from Obsidian? What would I gain?
Well done Luca,
Even without testing myself (yet), it's clear that you accomplished to deliver a foundation for the future.
A next bold step would be the lifting the application silos in the office suite, incl. email and get them to become a coherent pool of relations.
💡Pls. update "for Mac" to "any OS" to extend your potential audience