Blog
Notes on local-first Markdown, sync through your own storage, and the road ahead.
A dozen themes I actually put care into, a density switch, and a couple you'll have to find yourself — because an app you stare at all day should look like your home, not mine.
The one note I open every single day, and why the friction of finding it again next month mattered enough to obsess over.
Why I built Plainva so your hands never have to leave the keyboard: a slash menu, wiki links that don't break, and two shortcuts that get you anywhere.
Thinking of moving from Notion to local Markdown? An honest look at what you gain, what you give up, and how Plainva softens the landing.
A big vault shouldn't feel like wading through mud. How Plainva stays snappy with tens of thousands of notes — incremental indexing, instant search, and a graph that never turns into a hairball.
A red triangle appeared on a phone that had nothing wrong with it — because a device in a pocket runs no timers, and the watchdog measured on the wall clock alone. Fixing that turned into a small study of warnings: which ones a user learns to ignore, and why one of them silently cost me a merge.
Plainva is licensed under the AGPL and funded by grants and donations, never by your data — here's why that's not an accident.
Three reports came in, and each of them led to something that already existed and was simply never wired up. The capability to create a task in your provider's list was finished in all three providers and had, in the whole repository, no caller at all. This release is to a large extent about connecting things that were already there.
Plainva shipped its first release — an honest look at what's bugging me, what I'm excited about, and what won't change no matter what comes next.
Three finished pieces of work in three days, and one question underneath all of them: where does a function actually belong? A reminder belongs to the operating system. A mail rule belongs on the server. And a password belongs under a name that means the same thing on every device — not six names, five of them tombstones.
There's nothing to export from Plainva, because your notes were always just plain files — here's the promise I keep coming back to.
The phone had twenty-four screens and could do about half of what the desktop could. Rebuilding it turned up something worse than any missing feature: a gesture that never worked on a real device, and could not have been caught, because every check I run drives with a mouse.
The question I get asked most is what happens to an Obsidian vault when you open it in Plainva — here's the honest answer.
Why I don't fully trust graph views, and what I built instead: a context graph, a zoomable vault map, and a cleanup mode that checks its own suggestions before touching a file.
Grouping messages into conversations broke an assumption I had been leaning on for months: that a message id identifies a message. It does not — it is local to a folder, and local to an account. Plus a sample vault that explains itself, templates that ask, and three holes that made two cloud accounts look incompatible.
The import went from six sources to 27, but the real work was making it honest: attachments arrived at all for the first time, dates come from your export instead of from today, and a broken entry no longer costs the whole run. Plus a sync that finally says what it carries.
Why I built local version history and a daily backup into Plainva — a tool that holds your notes should make losing them hard, not easy.
A Microsoft account now consents once instead of three times, every bar and sidebar is arranged in one place, and the settings sync stopped quietly splitting itself in two. Plus repeating tasks, mail signatures, and a full mail client on the phone.
Why Plainva's S3-compatible sync asks for nothing more than an endpoint, a bucket and a key pair, built for the self-hosters who already have one sitting there.
Plainva can now bring your notes over from Notion, Evernote, Google Keep, Simplenote, Logseq or a plain Markdown folder — with Notion databases arriving as real .base files. Plus a first experimental take on encrypted workspaces, and deleting that finally understands connections.
Keep your notes wherever they already live — OneDrive and Dropbox just connect, Google Drive is the one that still asks a little of you.
Every cloud login for a vault now lives in one Cloud accounts area, the mail catalog grew from Google-only to Apple, mailbox.org, Fastmail and ~46 more, and a full design pass makes the whole app more consistent. macOS builds are now signed and notarized. Still plain Markdown, no format changes.
The biggest release since 0.3.0: a Google-Keep-style Pinboard view, a completely reorganized Settings experience on desktop and mobile, and two large new areas — Calendar and Email — that ship as experimental. Still plain Markdown, no format changes.
The one thing I missed most when I left Notion for plain Markdown — now built into Plainva, with nothing under the hood but your notes' own frontmatter.
A follow-up to 0.3.0: assign a template to a database so it shows up right where you create entries, a sync fix that stops stray .CONFLICT files, clearer Graph and Tasks tabs, and a batch of mobile polish.
The biggest feature release since launch: a vault-wide Tasks view, a redesigned graph that packs folders into nested circles, a rebuilt keyboard-shortcut system with an F1 help window, vault-wide find and replace, and creating a vault straight in the cloud.
I'd rather tell you where Plainva still falls short than have you find out the hard way.
For most of its life Plainva has been a desktop app — that was always only half the plan. The other half is the same vault in your pocket, synced through the cloud storage you already pay for, at no extra cost. That part is nearly here.
A quieter follow-up release: recently opened notes and a Databases tab in the sidebar, a one-click update button, and fixes for index.md navigation and an over-eager Markdown-link parser.
The one sync bug I refuse to ship: a silent overwrite that quietly eats an edit you never noticed was gone.
The first big update after launch — atomic writes with draft recovery, a tougher sync engine, a reorganized settings dialog, and the font and zoom options you asked for.
Why I run my Obsidian vault straight over WebDAV instead of the Nextcloud desktop client, and what happens when I edit the same note on two machines.
My second release, shaped entirely by living in my own cloud-synced vaults — safer sync, a graph you can actually move around, and less daily friction.
Before I ask anyone else to test it, I put Plainva through hard real-world use myself — and that alone showed me where it hurts. That's exactly why I'm looking for testers.
Why I built an open-source, local-first Markdown editor — and an honest look at where v0.1 actually stands today.