The family's memory.

What merkich does

Pages, links and lists

• Pages are Markdown with a properties box for the frontmatter, templates, daily notes, #tags, callouts, math and section embeds.
• Links: [[wiki links]] with a picker while you type, backlinks, typed relations and unlinked mentions. Renaming a page rewrites every link to it.
• Lists: a checkbox is a task. Shopping, packing and to-do lists are just pages.
• Collections: a folder of pages becomes a table of their properties, a board, cards or a calendar, sorted and edited in place. "Who owns what" keeps the balance of who owes whom.
• History: every change is a Git commit with its author. Compare versions, restore from the trash, edit the files from outside and merkich picks it up.

Tasks and chores

• Due dates and times, durations, priorities, recurrence, dependencies, assignees and subtasks, from any checkbox on any page.
• My tasks across all pages, task boards and kanban pages, a task calendar.
• Chores the family takes turns at, with a board and a count of who did how many.
• A calendar server (CalDAV) of its own, so phones and calendar apps show merkich's tasks and remind you when they are due, and other calendar servers' task lists and calendars shown inside merkich, read and write.

Spaces and people

• Spaces are top-level folders with their own members: owners, editors and readers. Everyone has a personal space; anyone can create more and invite others.
• Passwords, two-factor sign-in, passkeys, or "Sign in with …" through OpenID Connect. An administrator area with accounts, spaces, backups, restore and export.
• Optionally a policy engine (OpenID AuthZEN, for example Keycloak or OpenFGA) decides every permission, for families on a shared identity provider.

Files and sources

• Attachments whose text is searchable: PDFs, Office documents, the text in pictures and scans, what pictures show, and transcripts of voice memos.
• Read-only sources alongside your notes: Git repositories, documents from Paperless-ngx, and your school's timetable, homework and exams from WebUntis. merkich reads them and never writes back.
• A web clipper and a share sheet on the phone to drop links and text into your inbox.

Search and Ask

• Hybrid search: keywords and meaning together, filtered by what you may see before anything is ranked.
• Ask: a question in your own words, an answer with cited pages, and follow-up questions.
• Built-in models run inside merkich (EmbeddingGemma for search, Gemma 4 E2B for answers and reading pictures). Or point it at an OpenAI-compatible server of your own, or at Claude or Gemini with an administrator's key, chosen per job.

Your own agents

• An MCP server lets Claude, OpenClaw or a local model search, ask and write on behalf of one person, with exactly that person's permissions, never more.
• Agent tokens with scopes, sign-in for agents through OAuth 2.1, an audit log of what each agent did, and an inbox to review what agents filed before it counts.
• Everything the web app does goes through the public HTTP API, described by an OpenAPI document, so your own tools can do it too.

Apps

• An installable web app that keeps working offline, with a quick switcher and keyboard shortcuts, themes including true black, your accent colour, density and text size, and a page read aloud by your device.
• An Android app for phones and tablets: read, edit, search, ask, tick tasks and share things into the inbox. An iPhone app is built but not published yet.
• English, German and Hungarian.

Run it yourself

merkich is free and open source (Apache-2.0). It is one process with one data directory: a Git repository for your pages and an SQLite database for the index.

• Nix: nix run github:kubicgruenfeld/merkich, or the NixOS module.
• Docker: docker compose up -d, with the built-in models included.
• Kubernetes: a Helm chart with one replica, health checks, metrics and dashboards.

Upgrades take care of themselves: start the new version and merkich migrates its database and index. It backs itself up every day. How to run it, every setting explained

Hosted with obacht

Families who let us run obacht for them will be able to add merkich to their family with the same accounts, as its own instance with its own data. It is being tried out and not open yet. About the hosted service

Open source

merkich is developed in the open at github.com/kubicgruenfeld/merkich. The demo space inside every merkich is its user guide: it shows every feature on real pages.