outl

Local-first outliner. Markdown is the source of truth. Sync that doesn’t corrupt your tree when two devices edit offline.

outl takes the parts of Roam Research and Logseq that work — bi-directional links, dense queries, block-level thinking, journal-first — and rebuilds the part that doesn’t: how your notes survive being on more than one device.

Where to start

You want to…	Read
Install and try outl in a minute	Getting started
Understand the pitch vs. Roam/Logseq	Why outl
Know exactly how sync works	Sync, done right
Use the TUI fluently	TUI manual
Change colors / write a theme	Theming
See where the project is going	Roadmap

What’s locked in

The shape of outl is settled, even though phase 1 ships one device at a time:

• Markdown is on disk, untouched. No id:: lines. No HTML comments. No frontmatter delimiters. What you wrote is what’s saved. Stable IDs live in a sidecar dotfile (.foo.outl) you’ll never have to look at.
• The op log is the source of truth. Not the file. Not the database. A sequence of Move / Edit / Create / SetProp ops with HLC timestamps. The tree you see is a projection.
• Storage is a trait, not a struct. sqlite ships today; ChronDB is tracked publicly for when you want git-style history with branches and time travel.
• Every UI surface shares one core. The TUI is just the first client. The Tauri desktop (phase 5) and the iOS/Android apps (phase 6) reuse outl-core and outl-md — including the tokens, the index, the slugify rules.

Status (May 2026)

• Single-device editor: works. Modes, undo/redo, autocomplete, backlinks, theming, fuzzy switcher, workspace-wide search, command palette.
• P2P sync: phase 2. The algorithm is implemented and tested (170+ tests); the network transport (iroh) is the missing piece.
• Desktop / mobile: phase 5–6.

Contributing

The README on GitHub has the install bits and the dev workflow. Open issues to discuss design before sending big PRs — the sync algorithm in particular has a 100% coverage rule on its critical functions.

License

MIT.