If this is your first time encountering my work, I want to introduce you to a project I have been passionately building: Folio.
Folio is an open-source personal productivity and note-taking workspace. Think of it as a highly flexible workspace—similar in versatility to Notion—built with a fundamental commitment to privacy and data ownership: it is local-first. Your data lives on your device, giving you total ownership and full offline access by default.
The entire source code is available on GitHub, empowering the community to inspect, contribute, or build upon it.
🛠️ Everything You Can Do with Folio
Folio is designed to be a complete, privacy-focused environment for organizing thoughts, managing projects, and writing:
📝 A Modular Block Editor: Craft documents using over 31 block types, including WYSIWYG rich text, interactive Kanban boards, editable tables, Mermaid diagrams, LaTeX equations, and an Infinite Canvas for visual brainstorming.
🎙️ Meeting Notes & Transcription: Record audio directly within a page and process offline transcriptions locally using Whisper.cpp, complete with speaker diarization.
🧠 Quill (AI Assistant) & Plan Mode: Folio includes an integrated AI assistant named Quill. With Plan Mode, Quill drafts an editable action plan before modifying your workspace, allowing you to review and approve changes first. You can run Quill completely offline using local models (Ollama or LM Studio), bring your own API keys, or connect to Folio Cloud.
🔌 Local MCP Server: Expose workspace tools directly to external Model Context Protocol (MCP) clients like Github Copilot or Cursor for advanced local AI workflows.
🔒 Encrypted Vaults & P2P Sync: Protect your vaults with a master password, Windows Hello, or Passkeys. Sync encrypted vaults across your local network (LAN) peer-to-peer without touching external servers.
🗺️ Knowledge Graph & Task Hub: Visualize connections between your notes using a force-directed graph view, and track every action item across your workspace in a unified Task Hub.
🚀 The 0.7.8 Milestone: Moving to a Custom Java Backend
While Folio is 100% functional offline, its optional cloud layer just underwent its biggest architectural shift yet.
As a backend developer specializing in Java and microservices, keeping Folio Cloud tied to Firebase became too restrictive for scaling. I decided to rebuild the entire cloud infrastructure from scratch: Folio Cloud has officially left Firebase and now runs on a custom Java 21 & Spring Boot backend.
This rewrite brings faster, reactive synchronization, lower CPU overhead, and total architectural control. In tandem, version 0.7.8 introduces a new file-tree vault engine with granular page history and strict anti-wipe safety guards to keep your notes safe.
💚 Open Source & Supporting the Project
Folio is, and will always remain, free and open-source for local use.
To help cover server costs and support continuous full-time development, I offer an optional Folio Cloud subscription. Subscribing unlocks convenience features such as:
Multi-device encrypted cloud sync.
Hosted AI for Quill.
Encrypted cloud backups & expanded storage.
Public web publishing and real-time collaboration.
If you love the mission of local-first, open-source software, subscribing to Folio Cloud is the best way to support the roadmap!
📥 Get Started
Folio is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and Web.
- 🔗 Website & Downloads: minealexgames.com/en/folio
- 💻 GitHub Repository: Check out the source code, star the project, or contribute on GitHub.
(Remember to make an external backup of your vaults before upgrading to 0.7.8, and enjoy the new update!)
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