Plainva
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Introducing Plainva

July 8, 2026

I started writing my notes in plain Markdown years ago, and what ruined every “modern” note app for me afterward was realizing how much of what I write down — plans, decisions, things I don’t want to lose — was quietly sitting inside someone else’s account, in a format only their app could open. Today Plainva goes public with its first release, built to close exactly that gap.

It’s an open-source, local-first Markdown editor for Windows, macOS and Linux. It opens your existing Obsidian vault unchanged — nothing migrated, nothing silently reformatted — and syncs through storage you already own: WebDAV/Nextcloud, S3-compatible storage, OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive — no Plainva account, no Plainva server in between. On top of those plain files it adds what a modern editor should have anyway: Notion-style boards and tables from your notes’ frontmatter, a graph view, full-text search, daily backups. If Plainva vanished tomorrow, every note would still open in any text editor. That’s the whole point.

Where things actually stand

This is v0.1 — real and installable, but early. I’ve tested Windows and Linux myself; macOS builds and runs but is unsigned for now (right-click → Open past Gatekeeper), and I don’t own a Mac, so Mac feedback matters more than most. There’s a real automated test suite behind it and the app backs itself up daily — keep your own copy of anything irreplaceable anyway, just good sense for any v0.1. (And if you’re waiting for a phone: mobile is on the roadmap, not here yet.)

If any of that sounds like your kind of notes app, download it, point it at a real vault, and tell me what breaks. Plainva is funded by grants and people chipping in, not investors — right now the most useful thing you can give it is honest feedback. Thanks for being here this early.

— Marco