Show HN: Octarine – a fast, lightweight, opinionated Markdown notes app
octarine.appHey HN! I’ve been building [Octarine](https://octarine.app/) for a little over 2 years. It started because I wanted a note-taking app that was:
- Lightweight (< 30MB, fast to launch, no Electron bloat).
- Opinionated (good defaults, clean UI, not a plugin bazaar).
- Yours (all plain Markdown, nothing proprietary).
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- Command bar (Cmd/Ctrl+K) to navigate and run commands quickly.
- WYSIWYG editor (rich text without live preview jumping).
- Git sync built-in — backups to GitHub/GitLab, no plugins.
- Natural language dates (“yesterday”, “last week”).
- Multiple workspaces, templates, tags, graph view.
- Backup anywhere — iCloud, Dropbox, Syncthing.
- Tabs & Panes — split and rearrange notes/graphs like a code editor.
*Pro Features*
- BYOK for over 9 AI providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Gemini and more!
- Ask Octarine — chat with your notes (RAG, embeddings done on-device).
- Writing Assistant — Sidebar assistant to help rewrite, improve or create.
- Focus Mode — distraction-free, sentence spotlight.
- Customisation — 30+ fresh themes, different paper types.
- Locked Notes — Disallow a note from editing.
- Folder Customisations — Add icons/colors to folders, have them manage their own unique sorting.
*FAQ*
- Free plan gets updates forever; some features are Pro.
- Pro is a one-time license (no yearly “updates tax”).
- Over 130+ releases shipped.
- iOS app is in development.
- Overlaps with Obsidian, but follows different methodologies about having less but baked in features, over an extensible plugin system (each work for different users)
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Try it: [octarine.app](http://octarine.app)
Changelog: [octarine.app/changelog](https://octarine.app/changelog)
Documentation: [docs.octarine.app](https://docs.octarine.app)
I’d love your feedback - what works, what feels off, what’s missing? Always open to ideas (and criticism).
Been an early supporter Love the features, simple and fast Looking forward to more task mgmt features to help organize the day along with note taking Please add dictation and summarise mode too Don't need collaboration features but could be great to have Google drive support to backup the data.
All the best and keep up the good work
I fought the urge to try anything else other than https://Dendron.so The wait is over. Seems like the perfect replacement, it checks all the boxes: "Lightweight, Opinionated, Yours".
I predict you HUGE success!
Thanks for your work.
Thank you!
Lot's of things planned while aiming to keep the lightweight and opionionated philosophy!
This is amazing, and truly impressive.
What's the best place to submit issues, feature requests, etc?
Something I use on Obsidian is my own CSS as a theme (to override default editor styling). I see themes is a feature of Octarine. Will users be allowed to set their own CSS as a "custom theme"?
Either:
1. Discord (https://octarine.app/discord)
2. Github (http://octarine.app/issues)
Currently the app supports 33 themes (3 free, 30 on the pro license). There's an item on the roadmap that would allow you to create your own themes (each theme is a palette of 10-12 variables - border/bg/text/outline)
Hope you like the app :)
Does it have multi cursor support? CTRL-shift D highlight for all occurrences of a selected text? That is the only reason I spin up VScode for.
Not at the moment, but it’s something I use in VSCode, so it’s on the backlog to be brought, just low on the priority list.
Since find/replace works fine for the current use case (even if not optimal)
When that is in while keeping it lightweight, I will be a customer. Multi cursor is a an incredibly versatile find and replace. It can remove newlines at specific points. It can skip a few characters of text. It can go up and down a certain number of lines before manipulating text.
Got it. I'll take a look, but there's no timeline guarantees.
The use case is far too niche to move engineering efforts to immediately, so it'll be prioritised when either:
- the ask quantity increases.
- when an adjacent part of the code is being improved/fixed and this could be tacked upon in the same release.
Thanks for the suggestion!
This looks really nice, love how clean the UI is.
this is really really well designed in comparison to apps like obsidian, since the standard design is actually very readable and actually makes you want to write stuff. i think this could replace my current zettler setup in writing papers when you could map hotkeys to most stuff, and it would have a zotero integration in some way. lovely project!
Thank you! I haven't really used zotero, but I feel you can integrate it using url schemes? I have a PR up that opens up `octarine://` url scheme to allow creating notes/folders (it was built for the webclipper repo).
Currently keymaps aren't modifiable, but there's an item on the roadmap to change hotkeys.
I don't have much clue about integration of such features as well unfortunately. Another thing I just realized though is, when you press CTRL+Z it will always open the "Recently Viewed" tab, I think that hotkey combination gotta be changed :D
Are you by any chance on a german keyboard? or a different keyboard layout?
I've had a report before where they keyboard layout messes up, for Z & Y. `Cmd + Y` is Recently viewed while `Z` does undo
I'm on a german keyboard layout, yeah.
Figured! I'll spend time soon to have the keyboard layouts not dictate hotkeys or override them.
Looks awesome! What's the tech stack btw?
Tauri - Bundler
React, Typescript, Tailwind, Tiptap - Frontend
File level operations, search - rust
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