Note: Dendrite is in active development. This documentation is updated as features are added and may be incomplete.

About Dendrite#

Dendrite is a small, local note-taking tool currently composed of two applications, a Go server dendrite.daemon and a Neovim plugin dendrite.nvim. The split exists so the server can be driven by any client. That is, any application that speaks JSON-RPC over NDJSON-framed stdio can talk to it; dendrite.nvim is just the reference implementation.

Why Dendrite?#

I decided to build Dendrite after having tried a number of different note-taking tools (obsidian, notion, milanote, etc.) and finding myself rarely opening them, because adding another application to my workflow felt like a chore. And also I like just using Neovim. By the way, I use Neovim.

I wanted my notes right at my fingertips and thought “why not just embed a note-taking tool into my text editor?”. After trying to do just this, with different attempts at using existing plugins and CLI tools (zk, telekasten, etc.) I found myself struggling trying to make them fit into my workflow. They all seemed to carry opinions that tie closely to zettelkasten and journal note-taking, which I did not want to limit myself to.

I wanted a flexible and simple tool, that does exactly what I want it to and how I want it to. Dendrite is the result of this.

Who is Dendrite for?#

Dendrite is for people who keep their notes in plain markdown and want their editor to be the interface and not a separate application.

It’s for people who value privacy and do not wish for their notes to be on some Golaith Inc. owned server.

It’s for developers comfortable rolling their own tools. The dendrite.daemon documentation aims to be comprehensive enough that if nvim isn’t your editor of choice, and therefore do not wish to use dendrite.nvim, you can build your own client.