Obsidian on the web Using Prosemirror

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Hi everyone,

I recently started using Obsidian for note-taking, but I noticed there isn’t an official or community web version!.

What if we built a simple, open-source Obsidian-like app for the web using ProseMirror?

  • Could be run locally, self-hosted, or in a Docker environment
  • Allow users to sync and access their notes from any device
  • Support linking to a local vault or importing files directly

I’d be happy to contribute or even start the project if others are interested. What do you think?

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This would be awesome. What do you see as the steps to get started?

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I believe CodeMirror would be a better fit for a project like this.

From Obsidian docs:

Obsidian uses CodeMirror (CM) as the underlying text editor, and exposes the CodeMirror editor as part of the API

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Hi there, Thanks for the comments and interest in this idea!

And yes @renato, CodeMirror looks like the better fit here, thanks a lot!

I was surprised to see how many people want a browser-version of Obsidian (like me), especially in this thread. From what I gathered, users mainly want:

  • Access from locked-down or unsupported devices (corporate laptops, schools, Chromebooks, Raspberry Pi, etc.)
  • Freedom to choose their sync provider (Dropbox, Google Drive, GitHub, etc.)
  • Self-hosted options (e.g. Docker) for full control
  • A lightweight web editor, even if not fully featured
  • To bypass corporate IT restrictions while still keeping notes private and accessible anywhere

The next big question is the data model:

  • Should we stick to atomic Markdown files (like Obsidian) and rely on cloud file storage for sync? If so, how do we handle indexing, graph previews, and CRUD performance at scale?
  • Or should we use a structured JSON/OPML model, which reduces file count and might make parsing/indexing faster?
  • Or support a self-hosted DB for storing notes, for faster queries and graph extraction, while still allowing export back to Markdown (or other formats)?