Sunstone is a desktop markdown editor for people who want the good parts of a knowledge base — live preview, wikilinks, backlinks, properties, tags, instant search — without the plugin sprawl and proprietary lock-in. It opens a plain folder of markdown files and gets out of your way.
There is no proprietary "vault" to create, import, or convert into. Sunstone
runs against any folder of markdown files. Point it at an existing
directory — your notes, your docs repo, a cloned knowledge base — and start
editing. Your files stay plain .md on disk, readable by every other tool you
already use, and portable the moment you close the app.
Sunstone has first-class support for the Open Knowledge Format (OKF) — Google's open standard for sharing knowledge as portable, agent-readable, vendor-neutral markdown bundles.
OKF is intentionally minimal: a directory of markdown files with YAML
frontmatter describing typed concepts. There is no schema registry, no central
authority, and no required tooling — if you can cat a file you can read OKF,
and if you can git clone a repo you can ship it. That makes a Sunstone
knowledge base equally consumable by humans, by AI agents, and by any other
editor, with nothing to migrate and no vendor to depend on.
Sunstone's frontmatter model (the typed-concept type / title / tags
fields, reserved files, and bundle structure) conforms to the OKF spec:
- Upstream spec: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog/blob/main/okf/SPEC.md
- Vendored copy in this repo:
docs/okf-spec.md
- Live preview — Obsidian-style hybrid editing: inactive lines render styled while the cursor line shows raw markup, with syntax-highlighted fenced code, task lists, and interactive GFM tables.
- Wikilinks + backlinks — navigate links between concepts; every concept shows which others link to it.
- Frontmatter / Properties panel — edit typed frontmatter as structured fields (scalars, lists, tags) with complex YAML round-tripped verbatim.
- Tag browser — browse and filter your bundle by tag, with live counts.
- Full-text search — search across every concept with snippet results.
- Quick-nav palette — jump to any concept instantly from a fuzzy command palette.
- Outline panel — a live heading outline of the open concept for fast scrolling.
- Annotations — select any text and choose Add comment from the
right-click menu (or press
Ctrl/Cmd+Alt+M) to attach a margin comment in a small note popup — no markup to type. This works in reading mode too, the preferred way to review. Notes render out of the text flow: the highlighted span is marked, a comment icon sits in the gutter, and hovering reveals the note; clicking the icon reopens the popup to edit or remove it. They are plain CriticMarkup ({==text==}{>>note<<}) in the file, so they travel in git and any other tool can read them — ideal for leaving feedback on generated docs for an agent's next pass. - Right sidebar — a second, collapsible sidebar housing Backlinks.
- Light + dark theming — a warm amber palette that follows your OS color scheme.
A live concept open against a real OKF bundle — Explorer, Properties, live preview, Outline, Backlinks, and the Tag browser, all on screen.
Margin comments on an implementation plan — highlighted spans, gutter comment
icons, and a hovered note. The annotations are CriticMarkup in the underlying
.md; the editor renders them out of the text flow.
Sunstone is built with Tauri, SvelteKit, and TypeScript.
bun install # install dependencies
bun run tauri dev # run the desktop app
bun run build # build the static SPA
bunx playwright test # run the end-to-end suiteSunstone can also be served as a server-rendered web viewer over a Bundle,
packaged as a single Docker image. Sunstone supports an authenticated write path,
but this Docker deployment runs it read-only (no write secret, unauthenticated
reads). See docker/README.md
for the docker compose run and the internal-network / unauthenticated-reads caveat, how to
back the served Bundle with a git repo (sidecar / hook sync patterns, with a
tested live-reload verdict), and how to publish the image to Docker Hub and
install it on a remote from the registry. This is separate from the desktop
release flow.
MIT