Zen

Zen is a notes app for people who want their writing to stay in plain markdown files on hardware they control. It replaces the rigid folder tree most tools impose with flexible tags, and it keeps the whole thing small enough to forget about once it is running.

The app is a single Go binary or a Docker Compose stack, backed by a local SQLite database, with a minimal dependency footprint and low resource usage. Full-text search is ranked with BM25.

The feature list stays close to what a notes app actually needs day to day.

• Tags over folders: notes are organized by flexible tags rather than a fixed hierarchy.
• Markdown depth: tables, code blocks, task lists, highlights and the rest of the standard syntax.
• Internal links: linked notes open in a side panel preview instead of pulling you away.
• Housekeeping: templates, pinned notes, archive and soft delete, and bulk archive and delete.
• Portability: import and export with your data intact, with companion projects covering automated backups and imports from other services.
• Experimental additions: a canvas for spatial organization stored as JSON Canvas, semantic search for notes and images, and an MCP server for searching, listing and reading notes.

Installation is a make build from source. Be aware of the maintainer's own framing before you depend on it: this is a personal project built for personal use, the codebase is there to fork and modify, and pull requests or issues may not get a reply.