A 3D knowledge graph · desktop & web
Mindscape turns a folder of markdown into somewhere you can go. Notes are nodes in a force-directed graph; links are the edges. You drive it from a Vim-style command line and find things by remembering where they were — the way you remember a room, not a filename.
The idea
A hierarchy makes you decide, up front, the one place a thought belongs. But thoughts don't live in one place — they connect. Every note-taking app eventually admits this and bolts on tags, backlinks, a graph view in a side panel you never open.
Mindscape starts from the connections instead. The graph is the interface.
Write [[Another Note]] in a body and an edge appears. Notes that many
others point at drift into hubs; lonely ones sit out at the edges as leaves. The
shape tells you which of your ideas are load-bearing — something a file tree
structurally cannot show you.
Nodes hold the place you put them. Physics keeps clusters coherent, so your layout survives contact with new notes.
Press : and type.
:add Title makes a node, :w writes it,
:e edits, :c recentres. Build a whole cluster without
the mouse.
urgent: true turns a node red and pins it.
chronology: 4 puts it on a timeline. category sets its colour.
Who it's for
If you hold a lot of interconnected material in your head and keep losing the thread, this is built for you.
Lay scenes on a chronological spine and see act structure as actual shape — fourteen nodes in act two and three in act one looks wrong before it reads wrong. Node size scales with word count, so thin chapters are visible from across the room. Character and faction edges show who is entangled with whom.
Subjects group into glass enclaves you can fly between. Flashcards live inside
the notes as Q:/A: pairs, so the surrounding context is one
glance away instead of stranded in a separate app. Deadlines glow harder as they
approach. Orphaned notes are obvious — you wrote it once and never connected it.
Characters, factions, places and timelines as one navigable structure. When a character shows up before their introduction, or an event links to a place it can't reach, the graph is where you notice. Campaign prep stops being twelve browser tabs.
Your files stay yours
Your vault is a folder of plain markdown on your own disk. Not a database, not a proprietary blob, not a row in someone's Postgres. Open it in any editor. Keep it in your own git repo. Delete this app and every note is still exactly where you left it, still readable.
Plenty of "local-first" apps still phone home for a font or a renderer on the first paint. Ours doesn't, and that's enforced rather than promised: the web build ships through a gate that scans the compiled output for third-party hosts and refuses to publish if it finds one it can't account for. The renderer and fonts are bundled, not fetched. You can confirm it yourself with a browser network tab, or in airplane mode.
The companion
Mindscape ships a companion that can run entirely on your machine through a local model runtime — no API key, no account, and nothing leaving the device. Ask it about your own notes and the conversation stays on your hardware.
It comes in three personas, because studying, plotting and drafting are genuinely different jobs:
| Persona | For | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Bookworm | Students, researchers | Quizzes you from the flashcards already in your notes, explains a wrong answer using the linked cluster around it, and hunts orphans. |
| Storylord | Worldbuilders, plotters | Reads structure and proposes — act balance, hubs and leaves, continuity it thinks doesn't add up. Proposes only; it never edits. |
| Writer | Novelists, screenwriters | Turns rough clusters into clean prose and tightens existing text without changing what it means. |
There's a hard boundary in the design: Plan mode inspects and proposes, Work mode acts. A read-only persona doesn't have write operations available to it at all — it isn't trained to be careful, it's structurally unable. Safety by construction beats safety by good intentions.
The companion works today, locally, and needs no key. But we'd rather you hear this from us than find out: the three personas currently run on a strong general-purpose open model with each specialist's instructions layered on top. The purpose-tuned weights are in training, not shipped. They'll arrive as a free update.
Likewise, the companion is a conversation partner today — it reads and discusses. Letting it perform vault operations directly is in progress, deliberately behind the Plan/Work boundary above. Buy Mindscape for the graph, the Vim navigation and the fact that your notes are plain files you own. The AI is a genuine bonus that's getting better, not the reason to click.
What's in the box
GPU-accelerated, with a software renderer fallback so it still runs where drivers are unhelpful. Drag to orbit, +/- to zoom, c to recentre, or let the physics settle the layout.
Edit in place with rendered preview. Standard markdown plus
an extended .krkmd flavour when you want more structure.
Type [[Title]] to link. Every note shows what
points back at it, so context arrives without you filing anything.
Search across note bodies and titles, then jump to the node the result lives in.
Chronology mode lays notes along a spine. Categories colour nodes and group them into enclaves you can navigate between.
A native Linux desktop build, and a WebAssembly build that runs in a browser with no install — and, as above, no third-party calls.
Get it
One payment, yours forever, including the tuned model update when it lands. No seats, no tiers, no per-month anything. If your notes are plain files on your disk, a subscription was never the honest shape for this.
Built on the same rendering engine as the rest of the hawktalk tools. Linux desktop and browser today; other desktop platforms are being packaged.