About

IWE brings IDE-like capabilities to markdown note-taking. It’s built for developers who want powerful tools without leaving their favorite text editor.

Philosophy

IWE is guided by a few core principles:

Local-first. Your knowledge lives on your machine. No cloud required, no sync subscriptions, no vendor dependencies. Use Git for version control and backup.

Editor freedom. IWE works with VS Code, Neovim, Zed, Helix, and any LSP-compatible editor. Your workflow, your choice.

Plain markdown. No proprietary format, no special syntax. Your knowledge is portable and future-proof.

Open source. Free to use, free to modify, free forever. Built by the community, for the community.

The Dual-User Vision

IWE is designed for a world where knowledge work involves both humans and AI. Your personal knowledge graph serves two users:

You access knowledge through your editor with IDE-like features: go-to-definition, fuzzy search, code actions for restructuring. You write, organize, and shape your knowledge naturally.

AI agents access the same knowledge through CLI commands: iwe find discovers entry points, iwe retrieve fetches content with graph context. Agents navigate relationships and get structured output.

This isn’t AI accessing your stuff — it’s genuine collaboration. Both you and AI build upon the same knowledge base, following the same graph relationships, understanding the same structure.

The key insight: the graph structure itself enables collaboration. Traditional files are opaque to AI — just text to search through. A knowledge graph with explicit relationships gives AI real navigation capability. It can follow connections, understand context, retrieve related knowledge intelligently.

And because it’s local-first, you remain in control. Your knowledge graph is the context bridge you choose to share with AI tools — not data extracted and stored elsewhere.

Built for Developers

IWE isn’t trying to be everything for everyone. It’s specifically designed for technical users who want:

  • IDE features for notes — Go to definition, find references, rename symbols, code actions
  • Automated refactoring — Extract sections to new files, inline content back, transform structure
  • CLI power — Batch operations, graph visualization, document generation
  • AI integration — Agentic tools for AI memory and context retrieval
  • Performance — Rust-powered, handles thousands of files instantly

What Makes IWE Different

Unlike general-purpose note apps, IWE treats your knowledge as a graph with semantic understanding:

  • Graph transformations — Extract, inline, attach, and restructure content with code actions
  • Context-aware navigation — Find knowledge by its position in your knowledge hierarchy
  • Automatic normalization — Keep link titles, header levels, and formatting consistent
  • Cross-editor consistency — Same features work identically in every supported editor
  • AI-ready architecture — Same graph serves human and AI access patterns

Community

IWE is open source and community-driven.

Ready to try it? Check out the Quick Start guide.