Lokus is a local-first notes app that keeps your files in plain markdown

Local-first, with a licence that changes over time

Lokus describes itself as the open source note-taking app for people who own their data, and the three promises underneath are local first, privacy focused and fast. The notes are markdown files on your own device with no proprietary format, and the project says it works 100 percent offline. The performance claim is explicit in the README, roughly 50MB of memory against 300MB or more for Electron apps, which is the practical argument for the Tauri and Rust choice. The licence is the Fair Core License 1.0, described in the README as FCL-1.0-MIT, and the terms are spelled out in three bullets: free for personal use always, free for education and research in a non-commercial setting, and commercial licensing required for competing products or services. The licence then converts to MIT automatically after two years, which is what makes it a Fair Source licence rather than a permanent restriction.

The gap it claims to occupy between two camps

The framing in the README is that most note-taking apps fall into two categories, powerful but cloud dependent, with Notion named as the example, or local but closed source, with Obsidian named. Lokus says it is neither, and the specific claim for the second group is worth a careful reading. It says a local Obsidian is closed source, and it invites users coming from Obsidian to point Lokus at their existing vault, saying it works with existing notes. The difference the project is selling is not the file format, since both keep local files, but the licensing and the feature set: the Obsidian style tool is free for personal use and closed, and this one is source available with a feature set that includes database views and a canvas. Whether that is worth the licence conditions depends on what you intend to do with the code.

Tauri and Rust for the shell, React and ProseMirror inside

The tech stack table is where the memory claim comes from. The frontend is React 19 with Tailwind CSS and Vite 7, the backend is Rust with Tauri 2.0 and Tokio, the editor is raw ProseMirror with KaTeX for math and Shiki for highlighting, the canvas is TLDraw, and the graph view is Three.js with D3-force. Tests are Vitest and Playwright. The editor being raw ProseMirror is a deliberate choice, since it means the editor core is the upstream library rather than a wrapper around a hosted component, and the README calls out rich text with live markdown preview, wiki links with autocomplete, tables with resize and sort, task lists with 18 states, and smart paste that converts HTML to markdown. The Rust side is where the Tauri commands live, in `src-tauri/`, and the project keeps the two layers separate rather than mixing them.

What the feature set actually covers

The features are laid out in four groups in the README, and the split is worth reading because it shows where the product is dense and where it is thin. The editor group is the richest, with live markdown preview, wiki link autocomplete, LaTeX rendering, more than 100 languages of syntax highlighting, resizable and sortable tables, task lists with 18 states and smart paste. Organisation is next, with a 2D and 3D graph view, an infinite canvas built on TLDraw, Notion style database views, a template system with more than 90 features, daily notes, full text search, and tags and folders. Integration adds a plugin marketplace, theme customisation, a keyboard first design and around 30 slash commands. Privacy is the fourth group, with no account required, offline operation, standard markdown files, anonymous product analytics that are opt-out and crash reporting off by default, and optional encrypted cloud sync through Supabase.

Installing from a release or building it yourself

There is a binary for each desktop platform, linked from the releases page. macOS gets a `.dmg` for Intel and Apple Silicon, Windows gets a `.exe` for Windows 10 and 11 on x64, and Linux gets an `.AppImage` with `.deb` and `.rpm` also available. If you would rather build it, the source route is:

# Or build from source
git clone https://github.com/lokus-ai/lokus.git
cd lokus && npm install && npm run tauri build

For development the README lists Node.js 18 or later, Rust installed via rustup, and platform specific dependencies, and the setup sequence is:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/lokus-ai/lokus.git
cd lokus

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Start development server
npm run tauri dev

# Run tests
npm test

The repository also carries a `.devcontainer/` directory, a `docker/` directory and a `fastlane/` directory, so a containerised development environment and mobile release tooling are both set up. The `package.json` shows a workspace layout over `packages/*` and a large script surface, including separate Windows, macOS and Linux development targets that check the platform before running Tauri, and a `build:appstore` target that disables the in-app update checker for Mac App Store builds.

The first minute: open a folder and write

The quick start is three steps, and they are deliberately dull. Download and install Lokus, create a new workspace or open an existing markdown folder, and start writing. The second option is the one that matters for anyone switching tools, since a folder of markdown files is the unit of work, not a proprietary vault. The workspace concept then becomes the boundary of the application. A workspace is a directory on your machine, the app reads and writes markdown in it, and the graph view, the database views and the canvas are all views over those files rather than a separate store. The trade-off is implied by the design. A database view and a canvas need structure that plain markdown does not carry, so the metadata those views rely on has to live somewhere in the workspace, and that is the thing to look at before you migrate an important set of notes.

Sync, encryption and collaboration are the unfinished parts

The roadmap is split into a completed set and a next set, and the gap between them is where your decision should sit. The current list, labelled v1.0.0-beta, has the rich markdown editor, wiki links and graph view, canvas and database views, the template system, the plugin marketplace and encrypted cloud sync through Supabase all ticked off. The next list is not ticked at all: peer to peer sync using Iroh, mobile apps for iOS and Android, collaborative editing, end to end encryption, and a calendar view for databases. Read that list as the honest scope statement. A local first application with no peer to peer sync and no collaborative editing is a single user tool with optional cloud backup, and anyone whose requirement is a shared team notebook should look elsewhere. The environment example also shows a Google OAuth setup for a Gmail integration, with a redirect URI of `http://localhost:8080/gmail-callback`, plus Supabase keys, a self-hosted GlitchTip DSN and PostHog analytics keys, which is a fairly long list of integrations for a product whose headline is that it needs no account.

Licence, releases and what the repository shows

The licence field in the manifest is `FCL-1.0-MIT`, and the README states the three permission levels and the automatic conversion to MIT after two years. That is a reasonable shape for an application that wants commercial users to pay while keeping the code open, and the two year conversion is the part that makes the arrangement defensible for a company that wants to fork it eventually. Practical advice is to read the licence file rather than the summary, because the competing products clause is the part with teeth, and to note that the platform classifies the repository licence as a custom one it cannot map to a standard identifier. On maintenance, the release history runs v1.1.0 on 2026-03-03, v1.2.0 on 2026-07-31 and v1.3.0 on 2026-08-05, with the last push on 2026-08-27, so the project is moving. The root of the repository is also unusually transparent for an application, with product and planning documents at the top level such as `LOKUS_AI_PRD.md`, `LOKUS_MONETIZATION_PRD.md`, `LOKUS_DIFFERENTIATION.md` and `PROJECT_ARCHITECTURE.md`, alongside `QA-SYSTEM.md` and a `WIRING-CHECKLIST.md`.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt Lokus when you want Notion style organisation, database views and a canvas without giving up plain markdown files on disk, and when a desktop application that runs offline is acceptable to you. Do not adopt it if you need a shared team workspace today, because collaborative editing, end to end encryption, peer to peer sync and mobile apps are all still unchecked boxes on the roadmap. Verify first which sync path you need, since the shipped option is optional encrypted cloud sync through Supabase while point to point sync is listed as next, and read the Fair Core licence terms before you build a competing product on it.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. lokus-ai/lokus on GitHub
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases