silverbullet/website/index.md

Silver Bullet

Markdown as a platform

Silver Bullet (SB) is highly-extensible, open source personal knowledge management software. Indeed, that’s fancy language for “a note taking app with links.”

At its core, SB is a Markdown editor that stores pages (notes) as plain markdown files in a folder referred to as a space. Pages can be cross-linked using the [[link to other page]] syntax. However, once you leverage its various extensions (called plugs) it can feel more like a knowledge platform, allowing you to annotate, combine and query your accumulated knowledge in creative ways, specific to you. To get a good feel for it, watch this video.

What does Silver Bullet look like? Well, have a look around. You’re looking at it at this very moment! 🤯

Note that what you’re looking at is not a fully functional version, because the back-end is read-only. That said, it should give you some feel for what it’s like to use SB before making the commitment of running a single npx command (see below) to download and run it locally in its fully functioning mode.

Start playing

So, feel free to make some edits in this space. Don’t worry, you won’t break anything, nothing is saved (just reload the page to see).

Here are some things to try:

• Click on the page title (index for this particular one) at the top, or hit Cmd-k (Mac) or Ctrl-k (Linux and Windows) to open the page switcher. Type the a name of a non-existing page to create it (although it won’t save in this environment).
• Click on the run button (top right) or hit Cmd-/ (Mac) or Ctrl-/ (Linux and Windows) to open the command palette (note not all commands will work in this quasi read-only mode).
• Select some text and hit Alt-m to ==highlight== it, or Cmd-b (Mac) or Ctrl-b to make it bold.
• Click a link somewhere in 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.
• 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 Silver Bullet” 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).

There are a few features you don’t get to fully experience in this environment, because they rely on a working back-end, such as:

• Using SB’s powerful page indexing and query mechanism where part of pages are automatically rendered and kept up to date by querying various data sources (such as pages and their metadata, back links, tasks embedded in pages, and list items) with an SQL like syntax, rendered with handlebars templates.
• Intelligent page renaming, automatically updating any pages that link to it.
• Full text search.
• Extending and updating SB’s functionality by installing additional 🔌 Plugs (SB parlance for plug-ins) and writing your own.

Extensions

What type of extensions, you ask? Let us demonstrate this in a very meta way: by querying a list of plugs and injecting it into this page!

Here’s a list of (non-built in) plugs documented in this space (note the #query ... /query notation used):

• 🔌 Git by Zef Hemel (repo)
• 🔌 Ghost by Zef Hemel (repo)
• 🔌 Github by Zef Hemel (repo)
• 🔌 Mattermost by Zef Hemel (repo)
• 🔌 Mount by Zef Hemel (repo)
• 🔌 Backlinks by Guillermo Vayá (repo)

.

In a regular SB installation, the body of this query 👆 (in between the placeholders) would automatically be kept up to date as new pages are added to the space that match the query. 🤯 Have a look at the template/plug template (referenced in the render clause) to see how the results are rendered using handlebars syntax, and have a look at one of the linked pages to see how the meta data is specified, which is subsequently used to query and render in this page. And to learn about the specific plug, of course.

Explore more

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

🤯 Features 💡 Inspiration 🔌 Plugs 🔨 Development 🗺 Roadmap

More of a video person? Here’s two to get you started:

• A Tour of Silver Bullet’s features — spoiler alert: it’s cool.
• A look the SilverBullet architecture — spoiler alert: it’s plugs all the way down.

Principles

Some core principles that underly Silver Bullet’s philosophy:

• Free and open source. Silver Bullet is MIT licensed.
• The truth is in the markdown. Markdown is simply text files, stored on disk. Nothing fancy. No proprietary formats or lock in. While SB uses a database for indexing and caching some data, all of that can be rebuilt from its markdown source at any time. If SB would ever go away, you can still read your pages with any text editor.
• Single, distraction free mode. SB doesn’t have a separate view and edit mode. It doesn’t have a “focus mode.” You’re always in focused edit mode, why wouldn’t you?
• Keyboard oriented. You can use SB fully using the keyboard, typin’ the keys.
• Extend it your way. SB is highly extensible with 🔌 Plugs, and you can customize it to your liking and your workflows.

Installing Silver Bullet

For this you will need to have a recent version of node.js installed (16+). Silver Bullet has only been tested on MacOS and Linux thus far. It could also run on Windows, let me know if it does.

To install and run SB, create a folder for your pages (it can be empty, or be an existing folder with .md files) and run the following command in your terminal:

npx @silverbulletmd/server <path-to-folder>

Optionally you can use the --port argument to specify a HTTP port (defaults to 3000) and you can pass a --password flag to require a password to access. Note this is a rather weak security mechanism, so it’s recommended to add additional layers of security on top of this if you run this on a public server somewhere (at least add TLS). Personally I run it on a tiny Linux VM on my server at home, and use a VPN (Tailscale) to access it from outside my home.

Once downloaded and booted, you will be provided with a URL to open SB in your browser (spoiler alert: by default this will be http://localhost:3000 ).

That’s it! Enjoy.

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