SilverBullet is a Malleable, Private, Open Source, Self Hosted, Knowledge Management System.
Yowza! That surely is a lot of adjectives to describe, effectively, a browser-based Markdown editor programmable with Lua.
Let’s get more specific.
SilverBullet combines a clean Live Preview markdown editor (that you’re looking at right now) with wiki-style linking, a database with query language, and a fully integrated Lua scripting environment — turning your notes into a live, programmable system that grows with you, or your team.
SilverBullet keeps your content as a versioned set of files on disk. Primarily as Markdown Pages (called a Space). You navigate your space using the Page Picker or File Tree like a traditional notes app, or through Links like a wiki (except they are bi-directional).
A space may be yours alone, or shared with your team — see Guide/Working Together.
If you are the writer type, you’ll appreciate SilverBullet as a clean Markdown editor with Live Preview. If you have more of an outliner personality, SilverBullet has Outlining tools for you. Productivity freak? Have a look at Tasks. More of a database person? You will appreciate Objects and Queries (SLIQ).
And if you are comfortable programming a little bit — now we’re really talking. You will love dynamically generating content with Space Lua (SilverBullet’s Lua dialect), or to use it to create custom Commands, Page Templates or Widgets.
You were told there’s no such thing as a silver bullet. You were told wrong.
Dynamically generating content, programmable notes... why would you want that, and how does it work?
Let’s say you have documented a set of product features in individual pages that you’ve tagged with a #feature tag, and annotated with a few custom Frontmatter Attributes.
With a simple Query and Template, you can now dynamically build a product feature list, ordered by awesomeness (Alt-click or hover and click the edit button to see the underlying code):
${query[
from f = tags.feature
where f.tag == "page"
order by f.awesomeness desc
select templates.featureItem(f)
](<
from f = tags.feature
where f.tag == "page"
order by f.awesomeness desc
select templates.featureItem(f)
)} (The template generating the feature bullet items can be found in ^Library/Website Templates)
Neat huh? A few more use cases.
Let’s say you want to have a list of your 5 modified pages. We can do that: ${query[ from p = tags.page order by p.lastModified desc limit 5 select templates.pageItem(p) ](< from p = tags.page order by p.lastModified desc limit 5 select templates.pageItem(p)
)}
Maybe you want to collect all Tasks that you have not yet completed from across your space? No problem: ${query[ from t = tags.task where not t.done limit 3 select templates.taskItem(t) ](< from t = tags.task where not t.done limit 3 select templates.taskItem(t)
)}
That all sounds nice, but what does that look like in practice? Well, if you’re wondering purely about looks: have a look around — this very website is hosted as a read-only SilverBullet instance. You probably already figured this out.
If you’d like a bit of a tour and demo, give this a watch: ${embed.youtube "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mik1EbTshX4"} Want to see even more? Here is a whole playlist with instruction videos that go more in depth.
As mentioned, SilverBullet is a Self Hosted web application. This is great if you care about Data Sovereignty, but it does mean you need to Install it on a server yourself. Perhaps you do this on a Raspberry Pi you didn’t have a use for, a VPS somewhere in the cloud, or a box your team already runs. SilverBullet is distributed as a single self-contained server Install/Server Binary or Install/Docker container.
Want a pure desktop app experience? Give SilverBullet+ a try.
While this is a bit more complicated to set up than simply downloading desktop app or signing up for an account with some online service, self hosting is a path to both Data Sovereignty and to access your content from any device with a modern browser.
Ready? Proceed to Install, then follow Getting Started to learn the basics.
Enjoy!
