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OneBook

What OneBook is

OneBook is a desktop notebook built on Electron. Everything you put in it — a note, a checklist, an agent definition, the question you sent a model, the answer that came back — is a block.

Blocks live in one table. A block has a parent_id, so blocks form a tree, and a position written with fractional indexing, so you can drop a new child between two existing ones without renumbering anything. That tree is the interface: you navigate it, drag things around inside it, and collapse the parts you are not reading.

Why one table matters

Section titled “Why one table matters”

Chat history is normally stored somewhere else — a session log, a thread record, a vendor’s server. In OneBook a conversation is a branch of the notebook. A follow-up question becomes a prompt block under the completion block it answers, so the ancestor chain of any block is the message history that produced it. There is no second place to keep, and no sync between two stores that can disagree.

The same holds for AI agents. An agent is a block whose text is its system instructions. Its runs hang underneath it, in the same tree as your notes.

Four things to know before you start

Section titled “Four things to know before you start”
  • A project is a directory. Its data is a SQLite file inside it, at db/data.db. Copy the directory and you have a backup.
  • Nothing is hosted. There is no account and no telemetry. When a request leaves your machine it goes straight to the model provider you configured.
  • Deleting is reversible. Blocks are flagged, not removed, and go to a trash view you can restore from.
  • Markdown is the writing format. Block content is Markdown: GitHub-flavoured tables, math, Mermaid diagrams, and highlighted code.

Where to go next

Section titled “Where to go next”