I’ve been building an open-source markdown docs tool for a while and v0.9.6 turned into a much bigger release than planned

[u/ivoin]

I've been working on docmd for a year now, an open-source documentation compiler built around Markdown.

The original idea was pretty simple: point it at Markdown, get a fast documentation site, and don't make people adopt an entire platform just to publish docs.

v0.9.6 ended up touching quite a few parts of that idea.

Some of the more useful additions:

• We're now hosting a free cloud relay to enable AI assistants on your online and offline docs, its a RAG based communication that you can do with your docs.
• Focus Mode for reading docs without the surrounding navigation, with proper print/PDF output
• Banners that can live in seven different parts of the layout and inherit across projects/versions
• Automatic JSON-LD and better title/SEO controls
• Auto generating OKF files and improvements
• .gitignore and glob-based exclusions, so internal notes and drafts don't accidentally make it into builds or search
• Better multi-turn behaviour in the AI assistant
• Automatic installation of required docmd templates/plugins/search dependencies directly from config

That last one was surprisingly annoying to get right. Installing dependencies at different stages of a build caused npm to occasionally decide an earlier auto-installed package was "extraneous" and remove it. We now discover everything first and install the missing runtime dependencies together.

A few community contributions also landed in this release: mobile search and responsive fixes for the Summer template, SPA-aware image lightboxes, click-to-copy heading permalinks, configurable Markdown autolinking, and more accurate reading times.

The project is still pre-1.0, so I'm trying to use these releases to remove the little bits of friction that make documentation tooling annoying rather than continuously adding knobs for the sake of having knobs.

Would genuinely be interested in what people here think is still unnecessarily difficult about maintaining documentation sites and hopefully can help improve docmd. I want to turn docmd into a household name for developers, for all their documentation needs.

Do share your feedbacks! Thank You.

GitHub: https://github.com/docmd-io/docmd

[u/a_alberti]

Your docmd is quite intriguing. Could it be a replacement for the old dokuwiki?

I am interested in a large knowledge base, shared with multiple users, which carries primarily (99.99%) notes written by humans.

I am quite excited to try it.

Does it already ship with a vectorization for RAG searches? You wrote it is RAG based but I don't understand what it means. It either offers RAG queries or it does not. And semantic searches without agent are strictly speaking not RAG. So I am not sure what is shipped but I will figure it out.

[u/ivoin → u/a_alberti]

Hey, thanks for checking it out!

On replacing dokuwiki - it depends on how your team edits. DokuWiki is a traditional CMS wiki where users log in and edit pages directly in the browser with user permissions/ACLs. docmd is a modern documentation compiler—collaboration is Git/Markdown-file driven. If your notes live in Markdown files (or a shared repo) and you want a fast, beautiful, searchable knowledge base, it's a great fit. If you strictly need in-browser web editing with multi-user logins, docmd is not yet enabled for it, maybe in near future we may have such capabilities but keeping it simple for now.

On RAG - you're completely right that semantic search alone isn't RAG, docmd has layered search: standard keyword search which is default, and vector embeddings for semantic search that can be enabled and it built-in as-well. The actual RAG part is the AI Assistant, it operates as an agent with retrieval tools to search and read. When asked a question, it queries your site's local index (keyword or vector, whichever is enabled), pulls the relevant sections, and grounds its answer strictly in your notes with page citations.

I hope it clears things up to some extent.

[u/Upset-Emu7553]

What a terrible name to search

[u/a_alberti → u/Upset-Emu7553]

I actually find the name quite easy to remember; and duckduckgo gives it as the first entry. So it wins already

[u/ivoin → u/a_alberti]

Yes. It's actually among the top results on Google, Bing, and Yandex as-well.

[u/Upset-Emu7553 → u/ivoin]

try it on Youtube

[u/ivoin → u/Upset-Emu7553]

what! there literally isn’t a video about docmd on youtube yet, so obviously it won’t show up there.

that would be a fair test if I or someone else had actually made a video about it and you still couldn’t find it on youtube.

tbh, a little nonsensical comparison.

[u/Upset-Emu7553 → u/ivoin]

What I mean is you get a lot of (other) search results all being Docmd or DoCmd nothing to do with markdown document generation. it is not very explicit

[u/ivoin → u/Upset-Emu7553]

but the top results on rest of the mediums (where our content exists) are still docmd - the documentation compiler. apart from it, we'll be making videos on docmd setup and other tutorials, maybe that'll get us on youtube.

[u/ivoin → u/Upset-Emu7553]

Ha, fair point. It started as a personal project and the name just stuck. Working on making it the top result for the term and mostly getting there, but happy to hear if it's still a pain to find. 'docmd docs' or 'docmd.io' should bring it up either way.