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Zen

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Provides a self-hosted, minimal notes application for organizing markdown-based notes with full-text search.

About

Zen is a self-hosted, minimal notes application designed for efficient personal knowledge management. It leverages a single Go binary, storing notes as standard Markdown files within a local SQLite database. Emphasizing low resource usage and a clean interface, Zen allows users to organize their thoughts with flexible tags and quickly retrieve information through a powerful full-text search engine with BM25 ranking. Its built-in MCP support enables seamless integration for searching, listing, and reading notes, making it an ideal solution for those seeking a lightweight, private, and highly accessible note-taking system.

Key Features

  • Single Go binary or Docker Compose deployment
  • Organize with flexible tags and full-text search with BM25 ranking
  • Stores notes as standard Markdown files in SQLite
  • 393 GitHub stars
  • Low resource usage and minimal dependency footprint
  • MCP support for searching, listing and reading notes

Use Cases

  • Building a lightweight, searchable collection of markdown notes
  • Personal note-taking and knowledge base management
  • Self-hosted private journaling or documentation