Samong 🧠

A local-first knowledge base for the notes already in your repositories

You solved it once and wrote it down. Six months later the note is still in the repo and you cannot find it. Point Samong at a project root and the .md files you would commit become searchable and linked — and readable by the AI tools you already work with. Plain Markdown, Obsidian-compatible ([[wikilink]] / [[wikilink|alias]]), no account, no cloud, one binary.

Why Samong

• 📁 A note is a .md file you would commit. Point it at a repository, not at a special notes folder. .gitignore is respected and dependency directories are always skipped, so a project root indexes your ADRs, runbooks and design docs without dragging in node_modules — and samong doctor tells you exactly what counted and what did not.
• 🤖 Your notes become an agent's memory. samong-mcp speaks MCP, so Claude Code and Claude Desktop search, read and write the same knowledge base you do. No pasting context back in every session (setup).
• 🗺 The graph is the workspace, not a novelty tab. A vault is a shape; typing dims everything that does not match, so a query becomes a place.
• 🔎 Notes are addressed by path, not by title. One repository holds twenty files called README.md. A title cannot tell them apart, and an index keyed on titles silently collapses them — so search results, the API and the MCP tools all carry the real path.
• 📚 Learn from documentation you never commit. .gitignore answers "what do I distribute?"; a knowledge base has to answer "what do I learn from?". scope.include pulls a dependency's own docs in as read-only reference notes — one project, one brain, no second vault.
• 🔗 One repository per vault, links across all of them. [[other-vault/note]] resolves across every registered vault, and backlinks come back the other way without any cross-vault index to keep in sync.
• 🧭 Ranked by relevance and connectedness. When the words cannot tell two notes apart, the one the rest of your notes point at comes first. Capped at a 25% boost, so a popular note never outranks one that plainly matches better.
• 🧠 Semantic search, optional and local. Build with --features semantic and run samong embed to rank by meaning as well as by words, with a multilingual model that never leaves your machine. Off by default on purpose: see below.
• ⚡ Fast, and yours. Link graph in redb, search in tantivy, incremental reindexing that only touches changed files. Every index lives in <vault>/.brain/ and can be rebuilt from the .md files at any time — there is nothing to lock you in.

Install

Four ways in, in the order that costs you least trouble.

1. A package manager

macOS and Linux — waanvar/homebrew-samong:

brew tap waanvar/samong
brew install samong

Windows — waanvar/scoop-samong:

scoop bucket add samong https://github.com/waanvar/scoop-samong
scoop install samong

Once the winget submission is accepted this becomes winget install Waanvar.Samong with nothing to add first, since winget ships with Windows. The manifests are in `packaging/w

... View full README on GitHub