product
Notes Web is built first for Arkan's own Markdown and Obsidian-style vault workflows. The primary user is a technical, keyboard-oriented reader who wants fast access to private notes, tasks, links, tags, and vault diagnostics from a local or self-hosted web surface.
The project is open source, so the secondary audience is people with similar self-hosted knowledge-management needs. They should be able to understand the tool's philosophy, adapt it to their vault, and benefit from its defaults without the product becoming generic or diluted.
Notes Web provides a small, self-contained web interface for browsing, reading, searching, maintaining, and acting on a Markdown vault. It exists to make retrieval fast, reading comfortable, task review actionable, and vault maintenance visible without requiring a heavy app stack.
Success means the interface feels like a trusted extension of the vault: quick to open, keyboard-native, calm enough for long reading, dense enough for real work, and explicit enough that other self-hosted users can adapt its opinionated choices.
Calm, fast, opinionated, and artisanal. The product should feel like a carefully made personal tool rather than a SaaS dashboard, a cold wiki, or a framework-heavy web app.
The voice is direct, technical, and humble. It should explain states and actions clearly, avoid marketing language, and let the user's notes remain the center of attention.
- A cold documentation wiki that makes personal notes feel impersonal.
- A heavy app with framework-like latency, decorative motion, or unnecessary chrome.
- A generic SaaS dashboard with repeated cards, hero metrics, gradients, and marketing polish.
- An Obsidian clone that copies the desktop app instead of serving the web reading and retrieval context.
- A tool that becomes so neutral that it loses the personal-first point of view that makes it useful.
- Retrieval before decoration. Every design choice should make notes, links, tags, search results, and tasks easier to reach.
- Calm density. Surfaces can be information-rich, but they should not feel noisy, anxious, or mechanically crowded.
- Keyboard-native flow. Navigation, search, command palette usage, and task actions should be efficient without a mouse.
- Diagnostics as maintenance, not alarm. Broken links, orphans, and task states should support ongoing vault care without turning the interface into an error wall.
- Personal-first, reusable by design. Decisions start from real personal workflows, then stay explicit and adaptable so other self-hosted users can understand, keep, replace, or extend them.
Target WCAG AA for contrast, readable states, focus visibility, and navigable structure. The interface should be keyboard-first, with predictable focus order, reliable shortcuts, and command-palette access to core actions.
Interactive states must not rely on color alone. Labels, structure, focus treatment, and state text should carry meaning for users who navigate by keyboard or assistive technology.