Getting started

OneBook is distributed as source. There is no signed build to download yet — packaging runs locally with electron-builder.

Requirements

• Node.js 20 or newer
• A platform that can compile native modules: better-sqlite3 and nodejieba are both C++ addons

On Windows that means a Visual Studio Build Tools installation. If npm install finishes but the app cannot open a database, rebuild the native modules:

npm run rebuild

Run it

git clone https://github.com/ambitear/onebook
cd onebook
npm install
npm run dev

npm run dev starts Electron with hot reload in the renderer. Other scripts worth knowing:

Command	What it does
npm run typecheck	Type-checks the main process and the renderer separately
npm run build	Type-check, then bundle main / preload / renderer
npm run build:unpack	Build, then produce an unpacked app directory — the quickest way to check packaging
npm run build:win / :mac / :linux	Build an installer for that platform

Artifacts land in release/ and are named onebook-<version>.<ext> (Windows adds -setup).

First project

When the app opens it creates a project called default under ~/.onebook/projects/. A project is just a directory, and it holds its own database, so you can keep research apart from work by making two of them.

To write something:

1. Create a block. It appears at the top level of the tree.
2. Type Markdown into it. The 编辑 / Edit action in the block’s toolbar swaps the rendered preview for the CodeMirror editor; 预览 / Preview swaps it back.
3. Drag a block onto another block to make it a child. The whole subtree moves with it.

Blocks are ordered by their position key, and the order you see is the order you dragged into.

Next

• The block model if you want to know what a block actually is.
• Data and files if you would rather read the SQLite file yourself.