Zen
Live Demo • Features • Updates
Features
- Single Go binary or Docker Compose
- Low resource usage
- Standard Markdown files, local SQLite database
- Organize with flexible tags, not rigid folders
- Markdown features like tables, code blocks, task lists, highlights, and more
- Full-text search with BM25 ranking
- Import and export data with full portability
- Templates
- Pinned notes
- Archive and soft delete notes
- Bulk archive and delete
- Internal note links with side panel preview
- Minimal dependency footprint
- Automated backups (via Zen Backup)
- Import from other services (via Zen Import)
Experimental Features
- Canvas for spatial organization of notes and images (stored as JSON Canvas)
- Semantic search for notes and images (via Zen Intelligence)
- Similar images (via Zen Intelligence)
- MCP for searching, listing and reading notes
Installation
Build from source
$ make build
Local Development
Run the application using default configuration
$ make dev
Run the application in watch mode
$ go install github.com/air-verse/air@latest
$ go install github.com/evanw/esbuild/cmd/esbuild@latest
$ make watch
Schema Migrations
- Create new migration file under
./migrations - Use the format
<version>_<title>.sql
Image Versioning
$ git tag x.y.z
$ git push origin x.y.z
Contributions
This is a personal project built for my own use. The codebase is available for forking and modifications. Note that I may not actively review pull requests or respond to issues due to time constraints.