Nabu

The local-first, privacy-first knowledge base built in pure Rust.

Nabu is a Markdown-native desktop knowledge base for thinkers who demand speed, sovereignty, and polish. Write in clean Markdown. Think with interactive canvases, live backlinks, and a relationship graph. Everything runs on your machine — no cloud, no telemetry, no network calls unless you explicitly make them.

Built on a single Rust core (nabu-core) with a Dioxus 0.6 frontend compiled to WebAssembly and wrapped in Tauri v2 for native desktop performance. Zero JavaScript. Zero Electron. One codebase, one language, one source of truth.

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Quick Start

Download a prebuilt DMG from the GitHub Releases page:

Platform	Architecture	Build
macOS 13+	Apple Silicon (arm64)	Nabu-<version>-aarch64.dmg
macOS 13+	Intel (x86_64)	Nabu-<version>-x86_64.dmg
Windows 10+	x86_64	Nabu-<version>-x64.msi
Linux	x86_64	Nabu-<version>-x86_64.AppImage

A universal binary DMG is also published when both macOS architectures are built.

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Why Nabu

	Nabu
Privacy	All processing is local. Your notes never leave your machine unless you tell them to.
Speed	Native performance via Rust + WebAssembly. Startup in ~400ms, search in <10ms.
Portability	Plain Markdown on disk. No proprietary formats. Open your vault in any editor.
Extensibility	Capability platform with a plugin foundation. Extend Nabu with Rust plugins.
Resilience	Automatic version history, crash recovery, and undo/redo on every note.

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Core Features

Knowledge Management

• Setup wizard — first-launch flow to create or open a vault with native folder pickers
• Recursive file tree — reactive navigation with context menus, keyboard shortcuts, and command palette
• Markdown editor — live preview with task-checkbox support, toggle blocks, tables, and wiki-links ([[Note]])
• Tag parsing — real-time extraction from frontmatter with tag-based filtering
• Full-text search — in-memory index with relevance ranking and backlink discovery
• Relationship graph — interactive canvas visualization of your vault's link structure
• Template management — frontmatter templates with variable substitution ({{title}}, {{date}}, {{time}})
• Theme engine — reactive dark/light/system modes persisted to settings

Capture & Ingestion

• Clipboard capture — automatically ingest from system clipboard
• Screenshot ingestion — capture and embed images directly
• File drop — drag-and-drop files into the editor
• Folder watch — monitor directories for new content
• Dictation pill — floating scratchpad for voice input via Whisper.cpp

Version Control & Recovery

• Snapshot history — immutable version snapshots for every save, browseable with diff view
• Restore & duplicate — restore any past version or duplicate to a new path
• Session recovery — workspace state persisted and restored across launches
• Crash detection — .running marker detects unclean shutdowns and offers recovery
• Undo/Redo — full history stack with per-operation reversibility

Capability Platform

• Plugin foundation — manifest-based plugin system with permissions, dependencies, and feature contracts
• Process supervision — managed subprocess lifecycle with health checks and restart policies
• Synchronization — provider-agnostic sync folder/status models with conflict detection
• Diagnostics pipeline — streaming diagnostics (lsp, linters, custom providers) to the editor
• Live event bus — unified EventBus with pub/sub, bridged to the frontend in real-time
• Capability registry — runtime enable/disable/list of platform capabilities over IPC
• Health & metrics — live service health reporting and runtime metrics exposed over IPC
• Graceful shutdown — coordinated teardown persists index and vault graph before exit

Native Integrations

• macOS Vision OCR — automatic text extraction from images
• PDF annotation — dedicated viewer with highlight-to-note conversion
• Whisper.cpp dictation — local speech-to-text with configurable model sizes

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Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    src-tauri/ (Tauri v2)                  │
│  ── IPC commands ──────── 60+ Tauri invoke handlers     │
│  ── Event bridge ──────── EventBus → frontend (nabu-event)  │
└────────┬─────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
         │ WASM / cdylib
┌────────┴─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    crates/nabu-ui/ (Dioxus 0.6)          │
│  ── CSR frontend ──── Compiled to WASM, no JS runtime    │
│  ── Reactive state ── Dioxus signals + event subscriptions│
└────────┬─────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
         │ Rust calls
┌────────┴─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    crates/nabu-core/ (Rust core)          │
│                                                         │
│  Capture Engine ──▶ Worker Pool ──▶ Processing Pipeline │
│                                                         │
│  Storage Manager (KnowledgeObjects + Sidecar cache)     │
│  Indexer (full-text + backlinks)                        │
│  VaultGraph (adjacency model for relationship canvas)  │
│  EventBus (unified pub/sub across all services)         │
│                                                         │
│  Capability Platform: Plugin Manager, Process          │
│  Supervisor, Sync Layer, Diagnostics Platform           │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Data Flow

Capture (clipboard, file, folder)
    │
    ▼
CaptureEngine → WorkQueue → WorkerPool
    │
    ▼
Processing Pipeline (Harper, OCR, transformers)
    │
    ▼
StorageManager (writes .md + .json sidecar)
    │
    ▼
EventBus publishes ITEM_STORED
    ├─▶ Indexer (full-text index)
    └─▶ VaultGraph (relationship graph)

Building from Source

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.75+ (stable)
• Tauri CLI v2 (cargo install tauri-cli)
• System dependencies: libwebkit2gtk-dev, libssl-dev, pkg-config (Linux)
• Node.js 20+ (CSS pipeline only — no Node runtime in the app)

Development

# Terminal 1 — Tailwind CSS watch
npm install
npm run css:watch

# Terminal 2 — Tauri dev server (hot-reloads UI changes)
cargo tauri dev

Production Build

cargo tauri build

Output: src-tauri/target/release/bundle/ — signed DMG (macOS), MSI (Windows), AppImage (Linux).

Compile Check (CI)

# Check the Rust core
cargo check --workspace

# Check the Dioxus frontend (standalone workspace)
cd crates/nabu-ui
cargo check

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Documentation

Resource	Description
AGENTS.md	Agent guidelines and architecture notes
docs/	Architecture decision records and design documents
crates/nabu-core/src/	Rust doc comments (run cargo doc for full API reference)

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Community

• Issues: GitHub Issues — bug reports and feature requests
• Discussions: GitHub Discussions — Q&A and community chat
• Contributing: See CONTRIBUTING.md

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License

Copyright © 2026 Nabu Labs.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

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The name "Nabu" is inspired by the ancient Mesopotamian deity of writing and knowledge. This project is not affiliated with any commercial entity.