mdnest keeps every note as a plain Markdown file on a server you own — and opens it from your browser, your terminal, or Claude.
MIT licensed · no database needed · nothing phones home
One note: an editable table, tasks that feed the board — and a colleague typing in it with you. Light or dark follows your system, and so does this page. .
Every note is a .md file in a folder you picked. Grep it, back it up, commit it. No database owns your writing.
One Docker command on a box you control. No cloud account, no seat pricing, nothing leaving the building.
Browser, terminal, REST API, or an AI assistant over MCP — all reading and writing the same files.
Notes, drawings, tasks and the terminal — the whole thing in one pass.
Mermaid is plain text, which is exactly why a model is good at it. Ask Claude for a flowchart, paste the fence, and mdnest renders it — in colour, in both themes.
mermaid block
A whiteboard that saves as a Markdown file, right next to the notes it belongs to.
Every - [ ] you have already written becomes a card. Move the card, the line changes.
Open the same note as someone else and you can see them there — who is reading, who is typing right now, and what they think of that paragraph.
.md file — comments and presence sit alongside it, never inside your prose
The phone number to call back. Three things to finish today. Stickies sit beside your workspace, and they are private in the strongest sense: they never leave the server.
The trade is deliberate and worth knowing: a sticky has no git history and no off-server copy. Anything you would be upset to lose belongs in a real note.
Most markdown apps give you one bucket and a search box. mdnest gives you the tree you already think in — and more than one of them.
[[wikilinks]] if you are bringing an Obsidian vault
The same notes, whichever door you come through — and one terminal that talks to every server you run.
Same files, three front doors. Nothing is locked inside an app — an agent editing a note over MCP and you editing it in the browser are touching the same bytes on disk. Which is why a partial edit sends the version it read: if the note moved underneath it, the write is refused rather than quietly winning.
Two things you should never have to think about again.
There is no import, no index to rebuild, no database round-trip. A note is a file, and mdnest hands it to you straight off the disk.
Mount a workspace that is a git repository and mdnest keeps it committed and pushed on a schedule. You write; it saves the history.
Built over four major releases. Every one of these is in the box today.
[[note]], aliases and headings resolve in-app. Bring a vault across as-is.marp: true and the note becomes a deck you can present and export.Clone it, point it at a folder, start it. On your own, there is no database to install.
Need accounts, SSO or per-folder permissions? Multi-user setup adds Postgres for people and permissions — never for your notes.
The questions people ask before installing it.
A notes app you run yourself, that keeps your notes as ordinary Markdown files on your own disk — openable from a browser, a terminal, or an AI assistant.
As plain .md files in folders you choose. There is no proprietary database holding your writing, so you can open them in any editor, copy them to a USB stick, or track them in git. If you stop using mdnest tomorrow, your notes are still just files.
Yes. A drawing is a whiteboard canvas saved as an .excalidraw.md file next to your notes, and any note can show it. The words inside stay searchable, because it is still Markdown underneath. You can also write Mermaid diagrams in a code block and they render as you type.
No. On your own, mdnest needs no database at all. PostgreSQL comes in only if you invite other people, and even then it stores accounts and permissions — never your notes.
Yes. mdnest ships an MCP server, so an AI assistant can search, read and write your notes directly — the same files you see, with the same permissions.
Yes — MIT licensed and open source. You provide the machine; there is no paid tier and nothing phones home.
Free, open source, and running in about three minutes.