Nodus
Nodus is a local-first desktop application for academic research work that organizes sources, notes, evidence, and ideas into per-project workspaces called vaults. It targets university-style use cases -- literature review, historical research, teaching preparation, and coursework -- rather than general-purpose note-taking, and includes native Zotero integration for pulling in citation data.
Each vault is scoped to one project, so a researcher building a literature corpus, a historian documenting a family tree, or a student organizing a degree's worth of material can keep those workspaces separate while moving between them in the same application. The app is local-first: vaults and search indexes live on the user's own machine, with no account required to start. Any AI features are opt-in, and the user can point them at a local model instead of a hosted provider, which matters for research work where source material may not be shareable with a third-party API.
Nodus sits in Assess. It has meaningful early traction (257 stars, active weekly commits as of research) and a broader feature set than the more narrowly-scoped FlokinMd blip, which focuses on treating Markdown files as structured data rather than building a full research workspace around them. Despite that traction, no first-person production use has been confirmed, which keeps it below the bar for Trial.
