Why did I build medi?

Where are my files?

I have a bunch of markdown files scattered across my computer, in different repos and folder, and other random temporary spots. It’s hard to keep track of them all. It was a frantic dance of grep, find, and ls. It felt like I was fighting the filesystem, Commander One helped to a degree but not quite.

I started to think about abstracting away the filesystem and have a central place for my files, like in a lightweight database I could access instantly from anywhere in my terminal.

I had so much fun building tbdflow so I decided to build medi.

medi is a fast, editor-centric, commandline notes manager I wrote in Rust. It’s my solution to abstracting away the filesystem and creating a focused, high-speed workflow for writing.

A workflow, not just a folder

The core idea behind medi is to stop thinking about files and start thinking about content. I designed it around a few key principles:

• CLI-first: All interaction is through the terminal. It’s fast and scriptable, as an old Linux user I like pipes…
• Editor-centric: medi isn’t an editor but it will get you into your favorite editor ($EDITOR) with the right content. I use Neovim myself: export EDITOR=nvim
• Local & private: Your data is yours. It lives on your machine, no cloud component and no spyware, fully OSS.

Speed is a feature

The biggest win comes from using sled, an embedded database written in pure Rust. Instead of scanning a directory, medi performs a direct key lookup.

# This is instantaneous, even with thousands of notes.
medi get "my-old-project-idea"

This makes finding and reading notes feel very snappy, which is what you want from a tool you use every day.

Flexible by design

A good CLI tool should adapt to your needs. medi new supports three distinct workflows for creating notes, which has been a game-changer for me.

1. Interactively (for long-form writing):

   medi new "my-next-blog-post"
   # Opens Neovim in a fresh .md buffer
   

2. With a flag (for quick thoughts):

   medi new quick-reminder -m "Don't forget to buy milk"
   

3. From a pipe (for scripting):

   git log -1 --pretty=format:"%s" | medi new latest-commit-message
   

Version control

Of course, plain text files have one huge advantage: Git. I didn’t want to lose the ability to version control my writing.

That’s what the import and export commands are for. They act as a bridge between the fast sled database and the version-controllable world of the filesystem. My workflow is simple: I write and edit in medi all week, and then run medi export ./notes-repo and commit the changes. It’s the speed of a database with the safety of Git.

Check it out

Building medi has been a great learning experience in Rust, and it has genuinely improved my daily workflow. If you’re a command-line enthusiast who deals with a lot of Markdown, I’d love for you to give it a try.

You can find the source code on GitHub or install it directly with Cargo:

cargo install medi

The project is still young, and there are plenty of ideas on the roadmap, like adding task management features and full-text search. Check out the README and let me know what you think!

Real-world usage

This blog entry was written using medi,

medi new medi-blogpost
# writing and then saving for a break, ZZ
medi edit medi-blogpost
# save and close ZZ, or :wq if you like that better
medi get medi-blogpost > _posts/2025-08-12-why-medi.md
# Commit using tbdflow
tbdflow commit -t feat -s blog -m "add blog entry about medi"