Grimoire

Local markdown notes linked with relations and properties

Productivity

Notes

GitHub

OpenAI Day

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Inspiration I've tried every notes app out there in the market, and yet none of them fulfill what I always wanted to do. Some get close, like Notion or Capacities, but they all had some minor caveat. I want my personal knowledge management tool to allow me actually have everything in one place, I'll explain further on the What it does section) Until the release of Claude and GPT models in Q4 2025, I was a very lightweight user of AI, summarizing text and emails, asking questions on Perplexity and that was pretty much it. At this point in time I discovered the agentic capabilities of these models and that they actively allowed me to complete work that I could never do before. Even at my product management job, I automated a lot of work using AI. It was when Claude Fable released that I thought creating my own software was possible, because it was just able to understand what I wanted, and execute it in a way that made me enjoy using the things I was creating, but unfortunately the cost and rate limiting hindered me quite a bit, that's why when GPT 5.6 came out, I had to try it, and boy did it transform my workflow because of its cost effectiveness. What it does: Grimoire is a tool that in its core, it's just a notes app, but the core philosophy I wanted to bring to it is the portability of files. Just like Obsidian and a number of other tools, I think individual files are how you can keep the best control over your data and knowledge, and I don't like the concept of holding people's notes hostage, so you point Grimoire at a folder and all the sub-folders and markdown files in it will be shown. I created the concept of Note Types, and the idea is that you have a folder for notes about a Project, or notes about people, or notes about products, because these are the things I deal with daily in my product management and sales role. These note types are essentially the main property of a Note. Grimoire also allows you to set note properties which can be static properties (like a number, text, or list) or relations to other notes. The main purpose of these relations is that I want bi-directional information on each note. If I have a product note and this product was made by Mr. John Doe, I will link these two together. In the product note I will see the 'owner' relation with John Doe, and when I open the John Doe note, I will see the backlink for that product under the product category or type. I found this to be very basic functionality but it took most note taking tools years before they considered this. Now, one thing I do like about markdown files is that I can open a random markdown file and see its contents. But I don't always want these markdown files to pollute my vault, so I created a specific section for 'External notes'. You can use Grimoire to open these markdown files, they will open in this specific section, and you can choose to just close them or move/copy them to your vault if you want to keep them. Another issue I find with every note taking tool is that, if I have a company onedrive or google drive, the files in these drives are usually shared with other teammates and we need to collaborate, and most note taking tools either allow you to copy the file into the cloud (which then most of the times you have to open it in the browser and only then can you edit it locally), or into your local vault, but if you do that, you cannot keep your local file in the drive folder that preserves the editing capabilities with your team so, in Grimoire, you preserve the local folder location. You can open these files (PPTX, DOCX, etc) in Grimoire, and it creates a markdown note with the same name, and the interface displays buttons for you to either show it in Finder/Files Explorer, or to open directly in the default app (powerpoint, word, etc). Last thing. I find chatting with AI to be a very good way to find knowledge about your notes, but I don't want you to be forced to pay for something I provide if you already have an AI subscription or plan. So this first version has an embedded terminal that matches your existing shell where you can run Claude, Codex, Hermes, any tool that has a CLI really. How I built it I'm gonna be honest. I am not a coder, the whole thing was vibe coded but I do have some experience in the realm of building software so I understand how the pieces should work together and how the whole structure of a software should be, but like I said, I never even glanced at a line of code. The whole project started in July 2nd, 2026, Dyad (open source vibe coding app, where I used a mix of open weight models and Claude). The real shift came when GPT 5.6 released and I paid for the $20 sub to test it out. I was amazed at the Codex app, very refined and really good quality of life features. It was at this point where I just kept creating sessions for every feature I wanted to implement.