SilverBullet+ Release - Announcements - SilverBullet Community

SilverBullet+ Release

Announcements

zef

(Zef Hemel)

May 15, 2026, 2:35pm

TL;DR: SilverBullet+ is officially open for business. SilverBullet+ is the desktop version of SilverBullet. The fancy note taking app.

The selling point is that it's "just an app" (Mac, Windows and Linux). No server to install. Hopefully this will bring SilverBullet to (an even) bigger audience. Give it a shot!

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Download — SilverBullet+

SilverBullet+ is a programmable personal knowledge database built on markdown files — private by default, with live preview, wiki links, and Lua scripting.

The backstory

Once upon a time, little over 4 years ago, I was leading the platform organization at a company called Mattermost, a (mosty) open source company building a (usually) self hosted Slack alternative. In my role, I had 14 direct reports. I was struggling. How would I be able to keep all this context in my head? Who was working on what, what had we discussed before? I decided I needed to double down on my writing habbit and double down on my note taking habbit.

I used various tools for this purpose, and ultimately found Obsidian, a markdown-based tool. I liked it. I had used various notes app in the past, including Evernote (which famously went bad), Apple notes and various other tools that locked in my notes. Obsidian didn’t. Markdown had been around for a long time, and since it was just plain text , it didn’t lock you into a particular tool.

Also, Obsidian had a nice plugin ecosystem. There were many useful extensions.

I had a very specific need: I wanted to automatically pull in the latest pull requests and JIRA tickets my team members were working on, and somehow render that alongside notes I kept on my 1:1s with my team. How hard would this be to add to Obsidian? I got to work and explored how to build this as a plugin.

There were a few things that were not to my personal taste. First, I had somehow assumed that Obsidian was open source, but it wasn’t. It was free for various use cases, but not open source. I was in an open source company at the time, this wasn’t cool. Also, I didn’t like Obsidian’s plugin model all that much. I had worked on plugin infrastructure in various companies over the years and had opinions.

Also, there was no mobile app (at the time). How do I access my notes on mobile. How do I sync? Obsidian was clearly built with web tech, but packaged as a (rather heavy-weight) Electron app.

And the panes. The tabs. The splits. I wanted something with less visual distractions. No clutter, just notes.

So, one “Open Source Friday” I decided — let’s have a looksie. How hard would it be to build a simple notes app with CodeMirror and hack something together for myself?

As often happens with my “let’s have a lookie” side quests, this escalated dramatically. However, as is less common with my side quests: this one lasted, for many years.

And today, here we are.

SilverBullet went through many, many iterations. Features were added. Features were removed. I discovered Lua, it changed a lot. Then v2 happened and a lot of functionality was purged and reset.

The user base kept growing and growing. Since SilverBullet always prided itself in being open source, privacy focused and tracker free, I have actually have no idea how many people use it daily. However, whenever I quietly removed a feature, however obscure, people would always come out of the woodwork to complain. So clearly people were relying on this little tool.

Nevertheless, I felt a large potential audience remained untapped. SilverBullet was always developed as a self-hosted web app, which is cool and has many advantages — but it’s also quite a hurdle to get started. You need a server to run it on. You need to juggle with TLS certificates. Maybe you needed to put an auth proxy on top.

The audience that is willing to jump those hoops is quite niche. Could this be made easier?

I had dabbled with desktop (and mobile) “native” app wrappers before, Electron specifically, but it was too much of a pain to maintain. However, tools have evolved since then. So, a few months ago I decided to give it another shot.

And... the result is actually pretty damn cool (if I may say so myself). The end result is SilverBullet+, which wraps the original SilverBullet project and packages it into a single downloadable app. No need to run a server or setup certificates and other shenagans. And in my own use of this “new way,” it has expanded how and where I use SilverBullet a lot.

As it happens out, markdown is having kind of a moment, and it is now everywhere. As a result, I now actually spend a lot of my time at my “regular” job reading and editing markdown files, and doing that with SB+ is super easy. I just double click an .md file and it opens it in SB+. Or, I run the sb CLI from a folder with markdown files and it opens it up. SilverBullet has evolved to be...