Sunstone is a desktop markdown editor with the knowledge-base features you'd otherwise assemble from plugins: live preview, wikilinks, backlinks, properties, tags, and full-text search. It opens a plain folder of markdown files. Your repo is the sync layer; you diff, review, and collaborate through git commits instead of a sync service.
No vault to create, import, or convert into. Sunstone runs against any folder
of markdown files. Point it at your notes, a docs repo, or a cloned knowledge
base and start editing. Files stay plain .md on disk. Nothing gets indexed
into a database you can't grep.
Sunstone implements the Open Knowledge Format (OKF), Google's open standard for sharing knowledge as markdown bundles.
OKF is minimal by design: a directory of markdown files with YAML frontmatter
describing typed concepts. No schema registry, no central authority, no
required tooling. If you can cat a file you can read OKF; if you can
git clone a repo you can ship it. Humans, agents, and other editors all read
the same files, with nothing to migrate.
Sunstone's frontmatter model (the typed-concept type / title / tags
fields, reserved files, and bundle structure) conforms to the OKF spec:
- Upstream spec: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog/blob/main/okf/SPEC.md
- Vendored copy in this repo:
docs/okf/spec.md
- Live preview. Obsidian-style hybrid editing. Inactive lines render styled, the cursor line shows raw markup. Syntax-highlighted fenced code, task lists, and interactive GFM tables.
- Wikilinks and backlinks. Follow links between concepts. Every concept shows which others link to it.
- Properties panel. Edit typed frontmatter as structured fields (scalars, lists, tags). Complex YAML round-trips verbatim.
- Review changes. Toggle a diff of the working tree against
HEAD, or step back through history. Word edits render as CriticMarkup track-changes. - Tag browser. Browse and filter the bundle by tag, with live counts.
- Full-text search. Search every concept, with snippet results.
- Quick-nav palette. Jump to any concept by fuzzy name match.
- Outline panel. A live heading outline of the open concept.
- Annotations. Select text and choose Add comment from the right-click
menu (or press
Ctrl/Cmd+Alt+M) to attach a margin comment. Works in reading mode too. The highlighted span is marked, a comment icon sits in the gutter, hovering shows the note, and clicking the icon reopens the popup to edit or remove it. On disk each note is plain CriticMarkup ({==text==}{>>note<<}), so comments travel in git and any other tool can read them. Useful for leaving feedback on generated docs for an agent's next pass. - Right sidebar. A second, collapsible sidebar housing Backlinks.
- Light and dark theming. A warm amber palette that follows the OS color scheme.
A concept open against a real OKF bundle, with Explorer, Properties, live preview, Outline, Backlinks, and the Tag browser on screen.
Margin comments on an implementation plan: highlighted spans, gutter comment
icons, and a hovered note. The annotations are CriticMarkup in the underlying
.md; the editor renders them out of the text flow.
Sunstone is built with Tauri, SvelteKit, and TypeScript.
bun install # install dependencies
bun run tauri dev # run the desktop app
bun run build # build the static SPA
bunx playwright test # run the end-to-end suiteSunstone also ships as a single Docker image that serves a Bundle in the browser. The base deployment is read-only: no write secret, unauthenticated reads. A git-synced stack runs it writable, with every save committed and a sync loop reconciling against your git remote (the server clones your origin and syncs it itself, no sidecar).
docker/README.md covers the docker compose run, the
internal-network / unauthenticated-reads caveat, the three deployment shapes
(plain / git-local / git-synced) with the environment reference, and how to
publish the image to GHCR and install it on a remote. This is separate from
the desktop release flow.
MIT