A local-first markdown workspace with a built-in AI sidebar. Cursor, but for your notes and documents.
I liked Obsidian. I liked Cursor. But I kept switching between the two and never fully settled in either. Obsidian's markdown editing felt great, but it had no AI chat that felt native to me, and honestly I spent way too much time finding the best theme and best plugins. Cursor, on the other hand, had the AI sidebar I wanted, but it's a code editor and writing long-form text in it was exhausting.
I wanted one app that did both. And I didn't want to pay for another subscription just to get AI in my notes.
So I started building Cushion. Not as some grand plan, just to solve my own problem. When I needed dictation, I added local speech-to-text. When I wanted to chat with AI while writing, I integrated OpenCode (with MCP, skills, agents, the whole thing). Diagrams? Excalidraw. PDFs? Built a viewer. NotebookLM? Plugged it in. It kept growing from there.
It was only for me at first. But at some point I figured, why not open source it. So here it is. Use it, fork it, break it apart, whatever you want.
- WYSIWYG Markdown: CodeMirror 6 editor that hides syntax when you're not editing it. Write markdown, see rich text.
- AI Chat Sidebar: Powered by OpenCode. Skills, MCP servers, agents, multiple models (autodiscovered by OpenCode). No extra subscriptions.
- Local Dictation: Speech-to-text via Sherpa ONNX. Runs entirely on your machine, no cloud API needed.
- Rich file support: Excalidraw drawings, PDF viewer, KaTeX math, and more coming (CSV, calendar, ...).
git clone https://github.com/Aleexc12/cushion.git
cd cushion
bun installbun run dev:electron# Package Electron app
bun run package:electron- CSV and XLSX file support
- Canvas for connecting notes visually
- Split page view
- Rich text formatting inside tables (bold, italic, links, etc.)
- Floating toolbar for quick styling (Notion-style)
- Document export via Pandoc (Word, LaTeX, HTML, etc.)
- LLM post-processing for dictation in the AI chat bar, optimized for code
Fully tested on Windows and Linux (Ubuntu). Linux may have small visual quirks, if you run into anything please open an issue. macOS builds are possible but untested.
Beta. I use it every day and it works, but there are rough edges. Contributions and feedback welcome.
Cushion wouldn't exist without these projects:
- Obsidian and Zettlr for showing what a markdown workspace can be
- OpenCode for the AI backend that powers the chat sidebar
- Handy for the inspiration behind local AI dictation
- codemirror-markdown-tables for saving me from markdown table hell
- notebooklm-py for making the NotebookLM integration possible
MIT
