MALD

Terminal-first personal knowledge OS. Local files, local AI, sovereign defaults.

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MALD is a local-first knowledge workspace that keeps every note as plain markdown on disk. It ships a desktop app, terminal UI, and CLI sharing one engine: HNSW vector search + SQLite FTS5, a file-watcher daemon, and optional Ollama-backed RAG with cited answers.

Features

• Local files — plain .md on your disk, no proprietary formats, no cloud
• Three surfaces — desktop GUI (Iced), terminal UI (ratatui), CLI (~40 commands)
• Multiple spaces — separate notes for personal / work / research in one workspace
• Fast search — custom HNSW vector index + FTS5 keyword fallback
• Cited AI — Ollama-backed chat with inline [1] [2] citations to your own notes
• Graph + backlinks — wikilinks parsed live, force-directed graph, orphan detection
• Privacy by default — no telemetry, no external calls, no account required

Install

Windows — Scoop:

scoop bucket add mald https://github.com/NAME0x0/scoop-mald
scoop install mald

Or one-shot installer:

powershell -c "irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NAME0x0/MALD/main/install.ps1 | iex"

macOS / Linux:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NAME0x0/MALD/main/install.sh | sh

From source (requires Rust 1.78+):

cargo install mald

Quickstart

mald init           # create ~/.mald workspace
mald new            # create your first note
mald                # launch the desktop app

For local AI:

ollama pull gemma4:e4b   # or qwen3.5:9b — see Settings panel for picks
mald ask "what did I write about HNSW?"

Configuration

MALD stores everything inside MALD_HOME (default ~/.mald). Override it for project-scoped workspaces:

export MALD_HOME="$PWD/.mald"
mald init

Config lives in $MALD_HOME/config/config.json. Edit via mald config set <key> <value> or the GUI Settings panel.

Documentation

Topic	File
User journey & flow diagram	USER_JOURNEY.md
Design system tokens	DESIGN_SYSTEM.md
Frontend guidelines	FRONTEND_GUIDELINES.md
Tech stack details	TECH_STACK.md
Product spec (PRD)	PRD.md
Architecture & internals	CLAUDE.md

For the full CLI reference: mald --help and mald <subcommand> --help.

Stack

Rust · Iced 0.14 (GUI) · ratatui (TUI) · clap (CLI) · tokio · rusqlite (FTS5) · custom HNSW · pulldown-cmark · notify · reqwest · Ollama (optional)

License

MIT — see LICENSE.