Cabbage

Cabbage is a local-first, cross-platform desktop application for personal knowledge management. It stores all notes as plain Markdown files inside a Git repository, giving you versioning, offline use, and full data portability — no proprietary database, no cloud account, no vendor lock-in.

How It Works

A vault is simply a local directory on your file system. Open any folder in Cabbage and it becomes your vault — if it is not already a Git repository, Cabbage runs git init automatically.

Notes are standard .md files. As you edit, Cabbage saves your changes and silently commits them to the local repository. Syncing with another machine is a regular git push and git pull --rebase against any remote you configure (GitHub, GitLab, a self-hosted server — anything that speaks Git over SSH or HTTPS).

Current State

The core read/write/sync loop is working:

• Open a vault via a native folder-picker dialog
• Browse the file tree in the sidebar
• Create and delete notes
• Edit notes with CodeMirror 6 — Markdown syntax highlighting, line wrapping, minimal theme
• [[wiki-links]] highlighted inline; Ctrl/Cmd+click navigates to the linked note (creates it if it does not exist)
• Auto-save with a 1.5 s debounce — every save triggers an automatic local Git commit
• Sync button runs git fetch + git pull --rebase + git push
• In-memory backlinks index — notes that link to the current note are shown in the backlinks panel
• History panel — browse up to 50 commits for the active note, preview any version, restore with one click
• Inline error bar for failed operations

Architecture

The application is structured as a decoupled system:

• Frontend (Svelte): Handles UI rendering and user interactions. Holds no persistent state — everything is fetched from the Rust core via IPC. Editor is CodeMirror 6 with a custom [[wiki-link]] extension.
• Bridge (Tauri IPC): Secure communication channel between the Svelte webview and the native system.
• Core (Rust): File system operations, Git commands (via shell subprocess wrappers), and an in-memory backlinks index built with walkdir on vault open.

Git operations currently use shell subprocess wrappers. The roadmap includes migrating to native Rust Git bindings (gitoxide or libgit2).

Roadmap

• CodeMirror 6 editor with Markdown syntax highlighting
• [[wiki-link]] highlighting and click-to-navigate
• Note history view (per-file git log + version preview + restore)
• Graph view (visual node graph of backlinks)
• Native Rust Git bindings (replace shell subprocess wrappers)

Local Development

Prerequisites: Rust toolchain, Node.js (v18+), pnpm, Git, and the Tauri system dependencies for your OS.

git clone https://gitlab.com/moloo4ni/cabbage.git
cd cabbage
pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev

Build a release binary:

pnpm tauri build
# Output: src-tauri/target/release/bundle/

Disclaimer

Cabbage does not track user metrics, require registration, or communicate with any external servers other than the Git remotes you configure yourself. Everything runs locally on your machine.