Notes that never leave · aura-app

Links become a graph

The second-brain idea is simple: do not bury notes one by one in folders, link them. The moment you write [[another note]] inside a note, an edge appears between two ideas, and over time your notes become a map of what you think. aura-app does this on macOS, on plain Markdown files.

FIG. 1 — Pick a note on the left or click a node in the graph, and edit it on the right. Type [[Name]] and the link shows up in the graph instantly; link to a note that does not exist yet and a hollow node appears. Notes are stored only in this browser’s local storage.

Nothing you type on this page goes to a server: open the network tab in your browser’s developer tools and write a note, and you will not see a single request. That is exactly the promise of local-first software: the data lives on your device, and the cloud only joins in if you want it to.

Searching for the topic, not the word

Classic search wants an exact match. Semantic search turns every note into a vector and returns the vectors closest to the query. The figure below does the simplest, explainable version of this inside your browser: every note is a vector weighted by how distinctive its words are (TF-IDF). Because of Turkish suffixes, words are cut to their first five letters by a crude stemmer. aura-app does the same job with real embedding models and a vector index running on the device.

FIG. 2 — Type something. Left: notes ranked by similarity. Right: every note’s vector squashed to two dimensions (PCA); the gold dot is the query itself. Change the notes in Fig. 1 and this updates too.

[[wikilink]]: An edge between notes; over time, a map of thought.
local-first: Data lives on the device; the cloud is an optional layer.
vectors: Semantic search: note vectors closest to the query; TF-IDF here, local embeddings in the app.
in the code: github.com/cleoanka/aura-app