메아리 · Meari

Your notes, echoed back as learning.

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🏔️ The name

메아리 (meari) is the Korean word for echo — the voice that comes back when you call out across a mountain valley.

That's the whole idea of this app. You put knowledge into your vault — notes you write, lessons you ask for — and Meari sends it back at you: as questions, as graded essays, as coding challenges, as whole courses built from what you wrote. Reading fills a vault; the echo is what makes it stick.

📖 What it is

Meari is a self-directed learning vault: Obsidian-style markdown notes you own, plus an AI tutor that turns "I want to learn X" into a saved lesson note — and then echoes it back as study sessions until you actually remember it. Any subject: languages, math, history, science, code.

┌ notes ──────┐┌──────── editor ─────────┐┌──── chat / study ────┐
│ ▾ math      ││ # Derivatives           ││ lesson  …            │
│    limits   ││ A derivative measures…  ││ tutor   …            │
│ ▸ spanish   ││ [[Limits]] first.       ││ > ask the tutor…     │
└─────────────┘└─────────────────────────┘└──────────────────────┘

It runs as a fast terminal app and a native desktop app — two thin front-ends over one shared Go core, working on the same plain-markdown vault.

💡 Why Meari?

• 📁 Your notes are files, not a database. Plain .md with frontmatter and [[wikilinks]], in a folder you choose — point it at your existing Obsidian vault and it just works. Sync with git, edit with anything, leave anytime.
• ✍️ AI lessons become notes, not chat scroll. Ask to learn a topic and the tutor writes a focused lesson into your vault, linked to its prerequisites. Knowledge accumulates instead of evaporating.
• 🪄 Edit notes with AI, on your terms. :polish / :edit rewrite the open note — or just a passage you select in Visual mode; the proposal streams into the chat to review first, then :apply (undoable) or :discard. :ask talks with the tutor about a selection without leaving the note.
• 🎓 Notes become courses. Open a note, type :course, answer two questions — an agentic pipeline plans a curriculum from what you wrote, writes the missing lessons, authors an exercise per topic, and verifies every coding challenge by actually running its tests before you ever see it. :revise polishes a course with your feedback.
• 🎁 Courses are shareable. :publish exports a course as a self-contained markdown folder — push it to a git repo, and anyone can drop it into their own Meari and study it. Your echo can teach someone else.
• 🧠 Learning means recall, not re-reading. Study any note actively: write an essay answer and get it graded, with quizzes and spaced-repetition flashcards on the roadmap. A built-in coding tutor (write code → hidden tests → feedback) covers the programming side today.
• 🔌 Local-first and provider-agnostic. Works offline with built-in content; plug in OpenAI, a local Ollama model, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint for the AI parts. Nothing leaves your machine except the model calls you configure.

🚀 Quick start

go build -o meari .

./meari -vault        # the vault, in your terminal
./meari               # the tutor (launch dashboard: pick a course)

# the native desktop app (Wails):
cd gui && wails build  # -> gui/build/bin/Meari.app  (see gui/README.md)

Point it at notes you already have, and optionally wire up an AI. Copy the documented template and edit what you need (everything is optional — Meari runs with no config at all):

cp config.example.toml config.toml

# config.toml
[vault]
dir = "~/Documents/my-notes"   # default: ./vault

[ai]
provider = "ollama"            # or "openai" / any compatible endpoint
model = "llama3.1"

meari check verifies your AI setup end-to-end. Then, inside the vault:

You type	Meari echoes back
:learn the french revolution	📝 a lesson note, written into your vault
:polish · :edit make this tighter	🪄 an AI rewrite of the note (or selection), to review then :apply
:ask is this rigorous?	💬 a chat about the text you selected, grounded in it
:essay → :grade	🧠 an essay prompt on the open note, then a scored critique
:course	🎓 a full course built from the open note (:tutor → :topic to take it)
:revise make it harder	🔧 the same course, rebuilt around your feedback
:publish	🎁 a shareable copy of the course, ready for git push

Courses are plain markdown in meari-course/ next to the app — your notes vault stays untouched.

✨ Highlights

• 🤖 Agentic course building — :course interviews you in the chat pane (difficulty, scope, title — or just say "defaults"), then plans, writes, critiques, and verifies: code exercises run against the real executor and get repaired or demoted before shipping; dead wikilinks are stripped; a completeness critic adds what the outline missed. Courses are hand-editable markdown manifests.
• 🎁 Course sharing — :publish copies a course (manifest plus every linked topic note, so it's self-contained) into a publish directory meant to be a git repo. Recipients drop the folder into their meari-course/ and study it like their own.
• 🪄 AI note editing — :polish / :edit <instruction> rewrite the open note or a Visual selection; the proposal streams into the chat to read, then :apply (one u undoes it) or :discard. :ask / :discuss make a selected passage the subject of a tutor conversation that stays grounded on it across follow-ups.
• 🌲 A real file tree in the sidebar — a fixed vault root anchors it, new notes default there, r reloads from disk; fold/unfold directories and manage files NERDTree-style: Space to mark, m then add / move / delete.
• ⌨️ A modal Vim editor with motions, counts, operators, visual mode, undo/redo, a jumplist (Ctrl-O/Ctrl-I), and markdown syntax highlighting — fenced code blocks get real Go/Python highlighting inside your notes.
• 🔍 Fuzzy finding everywhere — ,ff jumps to any note, ,fg greps every note's contents, from any pane.
• 📋 A chat you can actually copy from — drag to select transcript text and Alt-C it to your clipboard; yanks work even over SSH via OSC 52; Alt-V/Cmd-V paste.
• 💬 A context-aware tutor chat in every screen: replies stream live, render markdown in color, and always see the open note, lesson, or code you're working on.
• 🔗 Obsidian-style backlinks, [[wikilink]] navigation, and per-note chat history.
• 🧩 One core, two faces — the terminal and desktop apps stay in feature parity because neither contains business logic; both drive the same headless engine.

📘 Read the full manual → — every key, command, and config option.

🗺️ Roadmap

• 🖥️ Desktop app — the core in a native window (Wails), with a Vim-capable editor
• 🃏 Quiz study kind and spaced-repetition flashcards (SM-2)
• ⚡ SQLite index: fast search, link graph, SRS store
• 🕸️ Visual knowledge graph

🌱 Status

In active development — Meari began as an AI coding tutor and is being generalized into the subject-agnostic learning vault described above. The coding loop still works end-to-end today.

If Meari's direction resonates with you, a ⭐ helps others find it — and if you build a course worth sharing, :publish it and pass the echo on.