Show HN: Octarine – a fast, lightweight, opinionated Markdown notes app

Show HN: Octarine – a fast, lightweight, opinionated Markdown notes app(octarine.app)

44 points by rajatkulk 262 days ago | 20 comments

Hey 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).

---

- 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).

maheshgawali 260 days ago |

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

vladsanchez 261 days ago |

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.

rajatkulk 261 days ago | |

Thank you!

Lot's of things planned while aiming to keep the lightweight and opionionated philosophy!

winter_blue 261 days ago |

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"?

rajatkulk 261 days ago | |

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 :)

sprremix 255 days ago |

I'd like to know the train of thought behind your idea of "Let's add an FPS counter to my Markdown editor".

Incredibly sorry to sound so negative, but nothing about this seems legitimate to me and I would never trust any of my files to this application.

rajatkulk 255 days ago | |

I used it during dev for debugging, figured to just expose it for anyone that is used to having a counter on top of their games :)

If an fps counter makes an app seem illegitimate to you, and the countless changelog, user testimonials don’t help, then nothing I say will convince you otherwise, so I’m not going to waste either of our times :)

Naga293 261 days ago |

This looks really nice, love how clean the UI is.

nfbx 261 days ago |

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!

rajatkulk 261 days ago | |

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.

nfbx 261 days ago | | |

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

nashashmi 259 days ago |

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.

rajatkulk 259 days ago | |

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)

nashashmi 259 days ago | | |

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.

PixelForg 261 days ago |

Looks awesome! What's the tech stack btw?

rajatkulk 261 days ago | |

Tauri - Bundler

React, Typescript, Tailwind, Tiptap - Frontend

File level operations, search - rust