silverbullet/website/SilverBullet.md

SilverBullet is an extensible, open source, personal knowledge management system. Indeed, that’s fancy talk for “a note-taking app with links.” However, SilverBullet goes a bit beyond just that.

You’ve been told there is no such thing as a silver bullet. You were told wrong.

Before we get to the nitty gritty, some quick links for the impatient reader: Install, CHANGELOG, Roadmap, Issues, Discussions, Mastodon, Discord, Docker Hub.

Now that we got that out of the way let’s have a look at some of SilverBullet’s features.

Features

• Runs in any modern browser (including on mobile) as an offline-first PWA, keeping the primary copy of your content in the browser, syncing back to the server when a network connection is available.
• Provides an enjoyable Markdown writing experience with a clean UI, rendering text using Live Preview, further reducing visual noise while still providing direct access to the underlying markdown syntax.
• Supports wiki-style page linking using the [[page link]] syntax, even keeping links up-to-date when pages are renamed.
• Optimized for keyboard-based operation:
  • Quickly navigate between pages using the page switcher (triggered with Cmd-k on Mac or Ctrl-k on Linux and Windows).
  • Run commands via their keyboard shortcuts or the command palette (triggered with Cmd-/ or Ctrl-/ on Linux and Windows).
  • Use 🔌 Core/Slash Commands to perform common text editing operations.
• Provides a platform for end-user programming through its support for annotating pages with Frontmatter and 🔌 Directive (such as 🔌 Directive/Query), making parts of pages dynamic.
• Robust extension mechanism using 🔌 Plugs.
• Self-hosted: you own your data. All content is stored as plain files in a folder on disk. Back up, sync, edit, publish, script with any additional tools you like.
• SilverBullet is open source, MIT licensed software.

To get a good feel of what SilverBullet is capable of, have a look at this introduction video.

url: https://youtu.be/VemS-cqAD5k

Try it

Here’s the kicker:

==You are looking at a (more or less) operational copy of SilverBullet right now==.

That’s right, this very website is powered by SilverBullet itself. 🤯

On this site, everything is editable, just none of it syncs back (successfully) to the server. You are editing a local copy of this website, so changes do persist locally. (Note that a few other features including directive updating are also disabled.)

Don’t just sit there, try it!

• Click on the page picker (book icon) icon at the top right, or hit Cmd-k (Mac) or Ctrl-k (Linux and Windows) to open the page switcher. Type the name of a non-existent page to create it (although it won’t save in this environment).
• Click on the terminal button (top right) or hit Cmd-/ (Mac) or Ctrl-/ (Linux and Windows) to open the command palette (note that not all commands will work in this mode).
• Select some text and hit Alt-m to ==highlight== it, or Cmd-b (Mac) or Ctrl-b (Windows/Linux) to make it bold, or Cmd-i (Mac) or Ctrl-i (Windows/Linux) to make it italic.
• Click a link somewhere on this page to navigate there.
• Start typing [[ somewhere to insert a page link (with completion).
• Tap this box 👈 to mark this task as done.
• Start typing :party to trigger the emoji picker 🎉
• Type / somewhere in the text to invoke a slash command.
• Hit Cmd-p (Mac) or Ctrl-p (Windows, Linux) to show a live preview for the current page on the side, if your brain doesn’t speak native Markdown yet.
• Click this button {[Editor: Toggle Vim Mode]} to toggle Vim mode
• Open this site on your phone or tablet and... it just works!
• Are you using a browser with PWA support (e.g., any Chromium-based browser)? Click on that little icon to the right of your location bar that says “Install SilverBullet” to give SB its own window frame and desktop icon, like it is a stand-alone app (not particularly useful on silverbullet.md, but definitely do this once you install it yourself). Now, unplug your network cable and reload the page. It still works!

Oh yeah, and you can use fancy things like tables:

Page	Comment
SilverBullet	Main product page
CHANGELOG	The latest updates

or code snippets, like JavaScript:

function helloWorld() {
   return "Hello there!"
}

or YAML:

name: SilverBullet
rating: 5

Install SilverBullet

Has your mind been sufficiently blown to commit to an install? Took you long enough, alright then. Please proceed to the Install and enjoy!

Where to go from here

Click on the links below to explore various aspects of SilverBullet more in-depth:

• CHANGELOG: What’s new?
• 🔌 Plugs: extensions available for, and as part of SilverBullet
• SETTINGS: What settings exist and how to change them
• Special Pages: a few page names in Silver Bullet have special meaning
• 🔨 Development: how to start hacking on SilverBullet itself

Support

If you (hypothetically) find bugs or have feature requests, post them in our issue tracker. Want to contribute? Check out the code.

Want to chat with us? Join our Discord!