Cerbo

A local-first Markdown wiki with a knowledge graph underneath.
Cerbo (/ˈt͡serbo/) is Esperanto for "brain".

Cerbo keeps your notes as plain files you own, gives every page a permanent UUID so links never break, and indexes the result as an RDF graph you can query with SPARQL or search by meaning. It ships as a desktop app and as a cerbo command-line tool that share the same vault format.

Features

• Local-first, plain files. Every note is a Markdown file in a .cerbo/ directory you can commit, sync and grep. No cloud, no database lock-in.
• Stable links. Pages link with cerbo://<uuid>; renaming never breaks a link. Backlinks come from a local index, not from files in the vault.
• Semantic annotations. [Bob]{schema:Person} marks what a page mentions, using schema.org and any ontology you import.
• SPARQL. Read-only queries over the vault's knowledge graph, from the CLI or the desktop console.
• Search by meaning. cerbo search and cerbo similar find related notes across languages with a local embedding model; text never leaves your machine.
• Desktop and CLI. A Tauri + Svelte editor with backlinks, similar notes and keyboard-driven navigation, and a scriptable CLI with --json output.
• Multiple vaults. Isolated knowledge bases anywhere on disk, found Git-style from the current directory.

Quick start

nix develop                        # dev shell with Rust, Bun, Tauri (or `direnv allow`)
nix build .#cerbo-desktop          # desktop app  -> result/bin/cerbo-desktop
nix build .#cerbo                  # CLI          -> result/bin/cerbo

cerbo init                         # turn the current directory into a vault
cerbo page create "My first page"  # prints the page's UUID
cerbo sparql 'SELECT ?t WHERE { ?p schema:name ?t }'

Prebuilt Linux releases are on the Releases page.

Documentation

docs/development.md	Dev environment, building, tests, releases, repository layout
docs/cli.md	The cerbo command line, with the full reference in man cerbo
docs/desktop.md	The desktop app: panels, SPARQL console, window, shortcuts
docs/links-and-annotations.md	cerbo:// links and [Text]{prefix:Type} annotations
docs/storage.md	What is on disk: the vault store, file formats, cache, config, older formats

The index of all pages is docs/README.md. Feature designs live in openspec/.

Tech stack

Rust workspace (core library, cli, src-tauri desktop) · Svelte 5 + Carta + Tailwind CSS · Bun · Nix Flakes · Oxigraph for the RDF store.

License

LGPL-3.0-or-later