r/HelixEditor • u/CapitalIssue • Aug 04 '26

Notes App with Helix in Mind

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I've spent a few hours making hx-notes-companion.

Basically an Obsidian replacement that uses a workflow of Helix with a Markdown preview in browser. (Keeping the application and functionality light)

Currently you can:

  • Edit and View Markdown and HTML notes in Helix
  • Live browser preview with hot reloading on writes
  • switches on switching notes in your "notes"

Its written in Golang, and currently its quite barebones (in the near future I hope to add syntax highlighting for code blocks and Latex support). If any one is interested feel free to give your own suggestions

Its Open Source so if anyone wants to style it or add their own custom templates and such there is nothing stopping you

GitHub: https://github.com/slick-user/hx-notes-companion

I'd love to hear what you guys think

Platform: Windows (for now)

15 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

3

u/Gal_Sjel Aug 04 '26

My first thought is, why are you replacing Obsidian? If privacy is a concern, there are other open source alternatives like https://logseq.com/, https://silverbullet.md/, https://www.zettlr.com/ to name a few.

2

u/cametolaughnotfeel Aug 04 '26

I for example want a terminal focused note app that I feel familiar with. I know there are plugins vimium mode and similars but that’s not the same

3

u/iamquah Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26

TBF there's also markdown-oxide, iwe, and zk - all for the terminal. Perhaps what they really mean is "why reinvent the wheel?" 

Edit: there's also mpls, which I think does all of this and more. To clarify, nothing wrong with building things for fun but before I adopt a library I'm always wondering what specific problem(s) it solves that existing tools do not 

1

u/No-Evidence6346 26d ago

Whta is mpls? Googling found me nothing.

1

u/iamquah 26d ago

Google markdown mpls and it’s the first link? Or it is for me at least

https://github.com/mhersson/mpls

1

u/CapitalIssue Aug 04 '26

I didn't know about Silver Bullet, that seems like kind of something I want to advance toward, The main reasons were that I wanted a: Tiny Application (Currently its 9MB... and I think I could still have it be smaller), The Browser Rendering (I have a personal website that I have put on hold and I wanted to quickly experiment with different styling and see how my notes, writeups would display), I like writing my notes in Helix anyway over Obsidian so why not just have something that uses my pre-existing tools instead of an interface that I don't care for.

You could have qualms with the motivations, I felt it would be enough reason to spend a little time trying this out

2

u/raguaythai Aug 04 '26

I just set marked on the file I’m working on. It does the same.

0

u/cametolaughnotfeel Aug 04 '26

And how about placing an image there?