OpenKnowledge

OpenKnowledge is an open-source markdown editor and knowledge base from Inkeep, built on the premise that AI editing should be the point rather than a side panel. It works on plain .md and .mdx files in any folder you already have — a codebase, a docs directory, an existing Obsidian vault.

WYSIWYG that stays faithful to the file

You get a real rich-text editing experience, not a raw text pane, and the underlying markdown stays byte-faithful as you type. Callouts, accordions, tabs, Mermaid diagrams, math, embedded PDF, video and audio, and embeddable HTML are all supported, alongside a file navigator, tabs, search, a wiki-link graph view, and a timeline for recovering earlier versions.

Agents are first-class editors

It ships an MCP server, Agent Skills, and agentic search built on embeddings with hierarchical retrieval, so an agent can navigate and author your knowledge base rather than grepping it. ok init detects and wires up the harnesses you already run — Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode, and OpenClaw — with documented setups for Antigravity, GitHub Copilot CLI, LM Studio, and others. The agent edits the same files you are looking at, live.

Local files, git for teams

Everything is local-first and private by design, with no hosted service in the middle. Team sharing and auto-sync run through git and GitHub, so a knowledge base reviews and merges like code.

Install and license

There is a native macOS desktop app; Linux, Windows, and Intel Macs run the same editor as a local web app via npm install -g @inkeep/open-knowledge, then ok init and ok start --open (Node.js 24+ and git required). OpenKnowledge is free and licensed GPL-3.0-or-later. It launched on Hacker News on June 25, 2026.