Your project's brain, on your disk - why OmniFolder exists

What is OmniFolder?

OmniFolder is a local-first project workspace for Windows. One folder of plain markdown becomes a connected mind: a WYSIWYG editor, a live knowledge graph, an infinite canvas, kanban planning, and an MCP server that lets AI agents work over the same notes - with your permission, node by node. There is no account requirement, no telemetry, and no database holding your work hostage. AI is a switch, not a foundation.

That is the elevator pitch. The rest of this post is the why - because the shape of the product falls out of two convictions, and if you share them, everything else about OmniFolder will feel obvious.

Why one app instead of six?

A working project accumulates prose, structure, sketches, and tasks. The standard answer is one app per shape - an editor here, a whiteboard there, a task tracker somewhere else - and the context dies in the gaps between them. The decision lives in one tool, the diagram that explains it in a second, the task it produced in a third, and nothing knows about anything.

OmniFolder’s answer is one node with multiple faces. The same idea holds its prose for humans, its technical spec for builders, and its canvas for the thinking that is not words yet - as layers of one thing, not three orphans. Wikilinks between nodes become visible synapses in the graph. Tasks anchor to exact sentences in the text, and when the text drifts underneath them, the anchor reports stale instead of lying quietly. Six tools, one window, zero copies of your data.

Why plain files?

Because notes outlive apps, and the only format with a guaranteed exit is the boring one. Everything OmniFolder writes is markdown and JSON in your folder. Any editor opens it. Git versions it. Grep finds it. If you uninstall OmniFolder tomorrow, you lose the views - never the work.

This is also the ethical position hiding inside the technical one: your second brain should live in your skull, not in someone else’s cloud. A tool for thinking is too intimate to be a rental.

Where does AI fit - and where does it stop?

AI in OmniFolder is deliberately double-gated. With everything off, the entire app works offline - writing, graph, canvas, planning, even semantic search, which runs its embeddings on your own GPU. Switch AI on and you choose the blast radius: local models that never touch the network, or cloud providers on your own API key.

Two design rules keep it honest:

• Egress is visible. The only pure white light in the product is the beacon that glows at the moment data leaves the machine. A promise you can see beats a policy you have to trust.
• Agents get windows, not keys. External agents connect over MCP to a server that is off until you start it, bound to 127.0.0.1, and limited to exactly the nodes you shared. Nothing else exists for them.

What does it cost?

The Free tier is out now for Windows - no account, no time bomb, and it includes the things other tools gate: the graph, the canvas, local AI, the MCP server. Paid tiers for teams and heavier workflows are planned; the one promise that will not move is that every privacy guarantee holds in every tier. Privacy is the architecture, not the upsell.

If any of this sounds like how you already wish your tools worked, the download is one click and zero forms away.