3.2 KiB
Silver Bullet
Markdown as a platform
Silver Bullet (SB) is a highly extensible, open source personal knowledge playground. At its core it’s a Markdown-based writing/note taking application 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. This makes it a simple tool for Personal Knowledge Management. However, once you leverage its various extensions (called plugs) it can feel more like a knowledge playground, allowing you to annotate, combine and query your accumulated knowledge in creative ways, specific to you.
What does Silver Bullet look like? Well, have a look around. You’re looking at it at this very moment! Say what!?
Feel free to make some edits, to get a feel for it. Don’t worry, you won’t break anything, nothing is saved (just reload the page to see).
Things to try:
- Click on the page name at the top, or hit
Cmd-k(Mac) orCtrl-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) orCtrl-/(Linux and Windows) to open the command palette (note not all command will work in this quasi read-only mode). - Select some text and hit
Alt-mto highlight it, orCmd-b(Mac) orCtrl-bto make it bold. - Click a link below to navigate there
- Start typing
[[somewhere to insert a page link (with completion) - Start typing
:pato trigger the emoji picker 🎉 - Type
/somewhere in the text to use a slash command. - Open this site on your phone or tablet and… it just works!
Explore more
Click on the links below to explore various 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.
Installing and running Silver Bullet
Like what you’re seeing? Install it yourself locally or on your server! It’s free.
To run a release version, you need to have a recent version of node.js installed (16+) as well as some basic build infrastructure (make, cpp). Silver Bullet has only been tested on MacOS and Linux thus far.
To install and run, create a folder for your pages (can be empty or an existing folder with .md files) and run:
npx @silverbullet/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.