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
Looks great Luca. Obsidian user here as well. Is it possible to point Tolaria at my existing Obsidian vault and run them both in parallel since it's working with .md files in the background?
Yes absolutely — it works out of the box. But you will get the most out of Tolaria if you use types and relationships, which are uniquely Tolaria's (for UX support — while they still use md standard frontmatters)
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.
Hi all I am a newbie from Berlin and have a somewhat difficulr problem with the new app Tolaria, which is similar to Obsidian.
I always run into this error message: Error: Failed to spawn claude: %1 ist keine zulässige Win32-Anwendung. (os error 193).
On Windows, Tolaria does not appear to use the bundled claude.exe. It falls back to npm-installed claude.ps1/cmd, resulting in WinError 193. Can you help?
I am putting in a plug for a tool I built since markdowns are all well and good but to actually manage all the various terminals for AI coding; a multi-terminal tool is needed. Sure there is iterm2 for osx, and tabby with multi-os support and now even Warp is being sponsored by OpenAI. But none of these tools quite fit what I was looking for--similar to how Luca build Tolaria with Obsidian already out there. My app also uses MCP to create a swarm feature with the various AI models working together as a team.
I'm used to seeing a file path when working with notes so I can verify that they are in the right folder. Where in Tolaria can I see the folder path or turn that on?
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?
Looks great Luca. Obsidian user here as well. Is it possible to point Tolaria at my existing Obsidian vault and run them both in parallel since it's working with .md files in the background?
Yes absolutely — it works out of the box. But you will get the most out of Tolaria if you use types and relationships, which are uniquely Tolaria's (for UX support — while they still use md standard frontmatters)
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.
Actually the toggle AI panel does not work anymore after update
thank you for reporting this! what version are you using?
2026.5.7
It appeared two updates before I think
Hi all I am a newbie from Berlin and have a somewhat difficulr problem with the new app Tolaria, which is similar to Obsidian.
I always run into this error message: Error: Failed to spawn claude: %1 ist keine zulässige Win32-Anwendung. (os error 193).
On Windows, Tolaria does not appear to use the bundled claude.exe. It falls back to npm-installed claude.ps1/cmd, resulting in WinError 193. Can you help?
I am putting in a plug for a tool I built since markdowns are all well and good but to actually manage all the various terminals for AI coding; a multi-terminal tool is needed. Sure there is iterm2 for osx, and tabby with multi-os support and now even Warp is being sponsored by OpenAI. But none of these tools quite fit what I was looking for--similar to how Luca build Tolaria with Obsidian already out there. My app also uses MCP to create a swarm feature with the various AI models working together as a team.
So i built --> Termpolis (https://termpolis.com)
I'm used to seeing a file path when working with notes so I can verify that they are in the right folder. Where in Tolaria can I see the folder path or turn that on?
Can I migrate an Obsidian vault?
How will you say it differs from Obsidian? What would I gain?
for now i just pointed it to my obsidian vault to test it out
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