Synapse
Write in Markdown. Find by meaning.
A calm editor that writes every note as plain Markdown. Sign-in and the editor are built; the service that stores documents and the search are designed, not built. We show it anyway, because this is what most products look like for most of their life.
- What it is
- A Markdown workspace, designed to search by meaning
- Status
- On hold since April 2026
- Started
- March 2026
The problem
Markdown is the most portable way to keep notes, but plain files are awkward to edit and hard to search unless you remember the exact words you used.
Tools that fix the editing usually do it by locking your writing into their own format.
How it works
You write in a rich-text editor. Every change is serialized back to plain Markdown; autosave, with its Saving and Saved indicator, is wired up and waits only for the document service.
Each person's documents will be theirs alone: the gateway already hands every service a verified user id to scope its queries by.
Search is the part still to come. Exact matches will come from a full-text index, and “find by meaning” from embeddings stored next to the notes.
Meeting notes
The budget worries came up again.
Start writing…
Underneath, plain Markdown
# Meeting notes The budget worries came up again.
Find by meaning
Designed, not built yet
Under the hood
Tokens never reach the browser. A thin Next.js backend keeps access and refresh tokens in httpOnly cookies, attaches them on the way out, and on a 401 refreshes once and retries without the interface noticing.
Branded sign-in on top of Keycloak. Users never see a Keycloak screen. An auth service wraps its token and admin APIs and turns its errors into plain messages.
One door, checked once. Spring Cloud Gateway validates every token and relays a verified user id to services that carry no security code of their own. It's the same shape as Goblin's.
Infrastructure in one command. A single compose file brings up identity, search, object storage and an analytics UI in health-checked order, with buckets and the realm created automatically.
Where it stands
The foundation was built in March 2026: identity, the gateway, the sign-in flow and the editor. The document service, search, folders, tags and Markdown import and export are designed but not built, and nothing is deployed yet.
It has been on hold since April 2026. We show it anyway, because this is what most products look like for most of their life.
Pace. Commits per week since December 2025. The quiet weeks are real too.
Synapse5 commits
Built with: Next.js 16, Plate, Java 21, Spring Cloud Gateway, Keycloak, PostgreSQL, pgvector (planned), Elasticsearch (planned)