Last Updated on March 4, 2026
Looksyk is a simple personal knowledge platform with a focus on clean markdown files, simple queries and a journal.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Local Storage: Your information is always exclusively in Markdown files (currently in testing: sync with a git repository).
- Fast and Efficient: Scans and indexes large knowledge bases in under a second.
- Simple Queries: Use case based query language.
- Runs local on your computer.
- Your information is always exclusively in the Markdown files. No replication in a database or similar. The files can be easily synchronized with the build-in git-sync other sync tools.
- Based on blocks, but these can also be larger, contain entire chapters and multiple queries.
- Multiple instances of Looksyk with different knowledge bases can be opened in parallel.
- Developer-centric file support:
- Insert code blocks with syntax highlighting.
- Save and display existing code files in your pages with syntax highlighting.
- Save and display backups of websites in your pages (with single-file-downloader).
- Insert videos, audio files, images, text files and PDFs.
- Custom styling of markdown content with html and css and support for custom themes.
- Pages.
- Journal (infinite scrolling page, single day page, journal overview page).
- Todos.
- Content assist:
- Creating links, inserting queries, tags, templates and media.
- View (and link) media:
- Images.
- PDFs.
- HTML Files (e.g. SingleFile saved pages from SingleFile Firefox or SingleFile Chrome).
- Video (html5 video player).
- Audio (html5 audio player).
- Code (with highlighting).
- Text files.
- Templates.
- Queries (placeholders for dynamic content):
- Query blocks.
- Query todos / visualize progress of todos.
- Query page hierarchy.
- Query references.
- Render video, audio, images, text files and code files (with highlighting).
- Search across all pages and journals.
- Delete and rename pages (and update references across all pages and journals).
- Favourites.
- History: Show, drop, navigate to previous and next page. Keyboard shortcuts available.
- Custom styling of markdown content with html and css.
- Sync your graph with a git repository. Combine this feature with a docker deployment on a server to have a simple web version of your knowledge base.
Website: github.com/SebastianRzk/Looksyk
Support:
Developer: SebastianRzk
License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
Looksyk is written in Rust and . Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn TypeScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Markdown Editors | |
|---|---|
| Mark Text | Simple and elegant Markdown editor |
| Zettlr | Billed as the Markdown editor for the 21st century |
| CodiMD | Realtime collaborative markdown notes |
| MindForger | Thinking notebook and Markdown editor |
| MarkFlowy | Modern and intelligent Markdown editor |
| ghostwriter | Distraction-free Markdown editor |
| ReText | Supports Markdown and reStructuredText markup languages |
| Apostrophe | Distraction free Markdown editor |
| StackEdit | Full-featured Markdown editor based on PageDown |
| PanWriter | Distraction-free Markdown writing environment |
| Looksyk | Simple personal knowledge platform |
| Remarkable | Python-based editor with live preview, MathJax support and more |
| Folio | Markdown note-taking app for GNOME |
| Scratchmark | Organized Markdown editor |
| Rucola | Terminal-based markdown note manager |
| Abricotine | Markdown editor built for desktop |
| ThiefMD | Markdown and Fountain editor and file manager inspired by Ulysses |
| Marker | Simple yet robust Markdown editor |
| Marknote | Create rich text notes |
| Notes-Up | Write beautiful notes fast and easy using Markdown |
| Norka | Continuous text editing |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |