Building Quake: An Open‑Source Knowledge Management Meta‑Framework for Geeks

Overview

Quake is a knowledge‑management meta‑framework for developers. It stores content as Markdown files, tracks changes with Git, and provides a terminal‑first CRUD interface. A web UI built with Web Components offers extensibility.

Design Principle 1: Data Codification

Documents are treated as code: content is written in Markdown and versioned with Git.

No embedded database; data migration, historical state tracking, and query/update are provided via a lightweight SQL‑like layer or scripting.

Design Principle 2: Free Customization

Custom Data Types

Data models are defined in YAML. The definition generates Markdown files with Jekyll‑style Front Matter. Example definition for a notes type:

- type: notes
  display: ""
  fields:
    - title: Title
    - description: String
    - category: String
    - created_date: Date
    - updated_date: Date
    - author: String
  actions: ~

Resulting file (e.g., 0001-time-support.md) contains the fields as Front Matter followed by the content.

Custom Display Components

Web UI components are built as standard Web Components. A typical editor component is instantiated and wired to the Quake API:

const editor = document.createElement('quake-editor');
editor.setAttribute('id', entry.id);
editor.setAttribute('title', entry.title);
editor.setAttribute('value', entry.content);
editor.addEventListener('onSave', function(event) {
  update_entry(event.detail.type, event.detail.id, {
    title: event.detail.title,
    content: event.detail.value.replaceAll("\
", "
")
  });
});
return editor;

Installation

With a Rust toolchain installed, run cargo install quake. If Rust is unavailable, download a pre‑built release package from the GitHub releases page.

Optionally install the MeiliSearch engine for full‑text indexing (e.g., brew install meilisearch on macOS or follow instructions at https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch for other platforms).

Initialize a workspace: quake init.

Start the local web UI: quake server. The server reads the configuration from .quake.yaml, where server_location can be customized.

Quake Cmd

The quake cmd tool synchronizes external data sources (e.g., Django CMS, Apple Notes, Microsoft To‑Do) into Markdown definitions. New entries can be added directly from the terminal:

quake cmd -i "blog.add: Quake a knowledge‑management meta‑framework"

After each operation a CSV index file is regenerated to enable fast terminal queries.

Quake Server

Running quake server launches a local web service that serves the Markdown repository and provides MeiliSearch‑backed global search. The UI is composed of Web Components, allowing developers to replace or extend any component while reusing the underlying CRUD API.

Future Work

Develop a richer Terminal UI for interactive CRUD operations.

Design an extended Markdown syntax to support bi‑directional links, embedded charts, and mind‑maps.

Implement a global GUI entry point similar to Spotlight Search.

Improve the web application UI and add additional features.

Complete full version‑control integration for all data types.

Source code and releases are available at https://github.com/phodal/quake.