A knowledge manager for the Mac · v1.1.39
One note pulls
on [[another]].
Skein is a Mac app for the things you are working on, the things you are learning, and the things you have not worked out yet. Write in Markdown, link one note to another, lay the lot out on a canvas beside the PDFs and pictures it came from, and ask your vault a question. All of it lives in a folder you control.
Or download the .dmg directly (20.4 MB, for Macs without the App Store)
Already keep a folder of Markdown, or an Obsidian vault? Point Skein at it. Same files, nothing to import.
Also on iPhone: Skein for iPhone opens the same folder, for capture and search. Free.
Your files
Ordinary .md files in a folder you choose. Open them anywhere.
Runs offline
No sync, no login. Nothing leaves your Mac.
Plain Markdown
Wikilinks, tags, YAML frontmatter. No proprietary format.
No subscription
Free. 15 MB download.
Five ways to look at it
The same note, the same vault, the same moment. Press one and see. Themes are chosen in Settings and reach every window at once. Nothing here is a mock-up.
Follows your Mac, light or dark, with a translucent sidebar. What a new install looks like.
Who picks it up, and why
Four situations Skein was built around. If one of them is yours, the rest of this page is detail.
You are writing something long
A book, a thesis, a case file. Chapters, sources, people and places become notes that know about each other, backlinks show what leans on what, and the PDFs you are quoting open beside the draft, with your highlights kept in a small file next to them rather than written into the PDF.
You already keep a folder of Markdown
Point Skein at it. Wikilinks, tags, frontmatter, callouts and .canvas boards read as they are, there is no import step, and a test checks that opening and saving a file leaves it byte for byte as it was. Obsidian can keep opening the same folder while you decide. What carries over, and what does not.
You are moving from another app
Import a Notion export, or a folder from Ulysses, Bear, Craft or iA Writer. Each is converted into plain files, nothing is deleted or overwritten, and you are told what changed. After that the notes are yours, in a folder, in any editor.
You want your notes to stay yours
No account, no sync service, no telemetry. The app has no network access at all, which you can check with one command rather than take on trust. If Skein disappeared tomorrow, every note would still open in TextEdit.
Lay it all out.
A canvas is where a pile becomes an argument. Put chapters from your vault on it, the PDF you are quoting, a chart, a spreadsheet, a link, a shape for the question nobody has answered, and join them with labelled arrows.
Click a note and it opens beside the board, so the arrangement you made to think with is still there while you use it. The board is saved as JSON Canvas, an open format, so it is a file you own rather than a view inside someone else’s app.
- Notes from your vault
- PDFs, shown as their first page
- Pictures
- Spreadsheets and other files
- Web links
- Text cards
- Shapes and groups
Double-click a file card and it opens in the app that handles it. More on the canvas
See what is around an idea.
A note is never really one note. Skein shows what leads to the thing you are reading, what it leads to, what sits beside it and what is merely related.
The local graph is not a map of everything you have ever written. It is the neighbourhood around the idea you are thinking about now.
The same vault, both ways. Drag to compare.
How the graph is arranged
Parents
Notes that lead here.
Children
Ideas this note points towards.
Siblings
Other notes in the same place.
Related
Notes connected through tags and links.
Inferred from your folders, your links and your tags. Nothing to label by hand.4
What makes Skein different
The graph is for thinking
Not a tangled map of every file you own. Skein puts the note you are reading at the centre and gives the things around it a shape you can hold in your head.4
The index is not your knowledge
The index can be deleted and rebuilt from your files. It lives outside the vault, so the folder you back up contains your notes and nothing else.3
The text never moves under you
Markdown renders as you write, driven by content rather than by where the cursor happens to be. The line does not reflow as you move through it, which is the thing live preview elsewhere keeps getting wrong.
A canvas for what will not sit in a list
An infinite board for notes, PDFs, pictures, links and labelled arrows, saved in the open JSON Canvas format, so the file opens in Obsidian too, and will still open in whatever comes after both of them.
Ask your vault a question
A small block in a note becomes a live list, table, board or calendar of everything that matches. No plugin, no query language with a JavaScript escape hatch, and nothing that runs code in your notes.
The whole list is on the features page. If you want the longer argument, I wrote up what makes Skein different and an honest comparison with Obsidian, including what Skein does not do. If you are still choosing, there is a wider comparison of the Mac note apps that names where each of the others wins.
If you only want one file
Everything above is about a folder of notes that know about each other. If what you actually have is one Markdown file - a draft, a README, something somebody sent you - then Skein is more than you asked for.
Lede is that: one file, one window, and the same editor underneath. The syntax disappears while you type in exactly the same way, because it is the same code. No sidebar, no folder tree, no links between notes, no search across a vault. It is free too, and nothing is held back from it to make this paragraph work.
Start there if you want to. Files written in one open in the other, because both are just Markdown in a folder you control.
Everything else
- Plain Markdown
- Your notes stay ordinary .md files in a folder you chose.
- Wikilinks
- Connect one thought to another. Type two brackets and keep going.
- Local graph
- The neighbourhood around the note you are reading, not a map of everything.
- Backlinks
- Discover what already points at an idea, with the line that mentions it.
- Unlinked mentions
- Notes that talk about this one without linking to it yet.
- Full-text search
- Search the whole vault and see the matching context.
- Quick switcher
- Jump between notes without leaving the keyboard.
- Command palette
- Every important action, one shortcut away.
- Properties
- Typed YAML frontmatter, without making it feel like a database.
- Tags
- Organise ideas without forcing them into folders.
- Daily notes
- A place to put what is happening today.
- Split view
- Read one note while working on another.
- Reading mode
- For when you just want to read.
- Templates
- Any note in your templates folder, with date and title filled in.
- Version history
- A snapshot on every save, kept safely outside your vault.
- Inline images
- Drag a file in and it lands where the cursor is.
- Export
- Paginated PDF, self-contained HTML, or the Markdown you started with.
- Native Mac
- SwiftUI and AppKit. No browser runtime, no web view.
Why Skein exists
I had the same three piles everyone has, and nowhere sensible to put them.
Most knowledge apps turn that into a project. Databases. Accounts. Sync. Plugins. Settings. The system becomes the thing you maintain instead of the thing you were trying to think about.
So I built something simpler. Skein is a native Mac app that puts your notes in a folder you control and then gets out of the way.
Skein is new. 36 releases so far, and the next one is usually a fortnight away rather than a year.
- 1.1.39Themes you can see before you pick them, a search that shows its working, and canvas boards that hold your files.
- 1.1.35Calmer writing, a caret of your own, Duo, and diagrams drawn in reading mode.
- 1.1.33Large vaults open much faster, and your PDFs and Office files show up in the sidebar.
- 1.1.32Tables keep their shape, large notes open faster, and changes show immediately.
- 1.1.31The window gives you a line back, and Format can take formatting off again.
The full release log →Tell me what should be in the next one →
What it costs
Nothing.
Skein for Mac is free.2 Not free for now, and not free until it catches on. There is nothing to buy, so here is every line somebody might expect to find a charge on.
- The app
- Free to download and free to keep. No trial, no time limit.
- Every feature
- All of it. There is no pro version, and nothing in the app is greyed out until you pay.
- The iPhone app
- Also free. Skein is one record on the App Store, so the iPhone app comes with it: nothing to buy twice.
- Updates
- Free, including the ones that add things.
- Notes and vaults
- As many as you like. Nothing is counted or capped.
- An account
- There isn't one to make. Skein has no login and no network code in it at all.
- Sync
- Not sold here. Keep your vault in iCloud Drive, Dropbox or anything else you already use, and Skein neither knows nor charges for it.
- Your notes, later
- Ordinary Markdown files in your own folder. Nothing to export and nothing held hostage if you stop using Skein.
Straight answers
- Will it open my Obsidian vault?
- Yes. Point Skein at the same folder. There is no import, and Skein does not read or change the .obsidian folder, so Obsidian opens the vault exactly as it did before. What does not carry over is whatever a plugin was doing: a Dataview block stays in the note as text, and Skein has its own live queries in core.
- What if I stop using it?
- There is nothing to export. Your notes are ordinary .md files in the folder you chose, and Skein keeps its index and version history outside it. Delete the app and every note is still there.
- Does it sync?
- Not by itself. Put the folder in iCloud Drive, Dropbox or anything else you already use and it syncs like any other folder. There is no Skein sync service and no plan for one. Skein for iPhone is free and opens the same folder.
- Is anything sent anywhere?
- No. There is no account, no analytics and no network code in the app. Run
codesign -d --entitlements - /Applications/Skein.appand look for a network entitlement. There is not one. - Can I add plugins?
- No, on purpose. Everything is in the app when you download it, and if a feature is not on the features page you cannot add it. For some people that is the whole appeal and for others it is a dealbreaker, and the Obsidian comparison says which is which.
- What does it run on?
- macOS 14 or later, on Apple silicon and Intel, signed and notarised by Apple so it opens without warnings.
Something else? The help page has more, or ask me directly.
Your notes. Your folder. Your knowledge.
Skein does not own your notes. They are ordinary Markdown files you can open anywhere, back up yourself, put in version control, or move to another Mac. If Skein disappeared tomorrow you would still have everything you wrote in it.
The easiest way to find out whether it suits you: copy a folder you already have, open the copy, and see. If it is not for you, delete it, and your files are exactly where they were.
15 MB · macOS 14 or later · Apple silicon and Intel · signed and notarised by Apple5
Or download the .dmg directly (20.4 MB, for Macs without the App Store)
Notes
- 1.Two figures, because they measure different things and quoting the smaller one against Obsidian would flatter us. 15 MB is what the App Store sends you (v1.1.39), because Apple thins the binary to the Mac you are on. 20.4 MBis the universal disk image carrying both architectures, and that is the number set against Obsidian’s universal 218 MB (1.13.7, August 2026), since like must be compared with like. Obsidian ships an Electron runtime and Skein does not, which is most of the difference either way, and is the point rather than a trick of measurement. ↩
- 2.Free. Skein for Mac costs nothing and there is nothing to buy: no paid tier held back, no cloud plan, no account. It is not free for now and priced later. Skein for Mac is free, and that is the whole sentence. Where your vault lives is up to you, and syncing it through iCloud Drive, Dropbox or anything else is your arrangement with them rather than a product sold here. ↩
- 3.The index is derived. Delete it and Skein rebuilds it from your files; nothing in it is knowledge you would lose. It lives outside the vault so that a folder you back up or put in version control contains your notes and nothing else. ↩
- 4.Parents, children, siblings and related are inferred from your folder structure, your links and your tags. There is nothing to label by hand, and no relationship editor to keep up to date. ↩
- 5.A skein is a loosely coiled length of yarn, and the collective noun for geese in flight. Both were considered at naming time. Only one of them has a local graph. ↩