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Welcome to Hibiscus

Hibiscus is a highly opinionated, lightning-fast, and elegant local-first study workspace. Built with React, Tauri, and Rust, it seamlessly merges a powerful code editor with deep productivity tools.

Hibiscus Screen Shot

Overview

Hibiscus is designed for developers, researchers, and students who need a unified, distraction-free environment to synthesize information. Rather than relying on cloud services, Hibiscus embraces a strict local-first philosophy: your knowledge stays securely on your machine, processed at native speeds by an underlying Rust backend.

Key Features

  • Blazing Fast Backend: Powered entirely by Rust and Tauri, offering native performance and minimal resource consumption.
  • Deep Study Tools: Featuring an integrated Pomodoro timer, native flashcard decks, comprehensive study statistics, and a zero-distraction Focus Mode.
  • Intelligent Knowledge Synthesis: A built-in document combiner that effortlessly fuses text and markdown documents recursively into cohesive, structured outputs.
  • Local-First Indexing: A robust background indexing pipeline that makes your entire workspace instantly searchable without ever leaving your machine. Now supports Markdown, Text, PDF, and DOCX documents with advanced TF-IDF ranking.
  • Hot-Swappable Theming: Enjoy meticulously crafted built-in themes (Midnight, Dawn, Forest) powered by a deeply configurable CSS variable API.
  • Workspace Management: A fast, reliable file tree equipped with debounce-optimized file watchers for immediate UI synchronization.

Architecture Summary

At the core of Hibiscus lies a strict separation of concerns:

  • Frontend: A React application utilizing the Monaco Editor for a world-class text editing experience, styled with a comprehensive dynamic CSS variable system.
  • Backend (Rust): Handles all heavy lifting—from file system watching and structural tree generation to robust, incremental knowledge indexing.
  • Knowledge Pipeline: A background worker pool continuously parses, chunks, and indexes your .md, .txt, .pdf, and .docx files into .hibiscus/knowledge/. The data is fully derived and rebuildable, guaranteeing that your source files are never mutated. Includes an in-memory LRU caching layer and query engine for blazingly fast retrievals.

Why Hibiscus?

Hibiscus stands apart by rejecting the trend of bloated, cloud-dependent workspaces. It respects your privacy, your system resources, and your workflow. Whether you're writing code, drafting a research paper, or organizing study notes, Hibiscus provides the tools you need—instantly, locally, and beautifully.

Quick Start

Ready to dive in? Head over to the Getting Started Guide to set up your environment or download the latest release!

User Documentation

Core Features

Productivity Tools

Customization

Workflow

Developer Documentation

Architecture

Backend & APIs

Contributing

Documentation Overview

Topic Guide Developer
Installation Getting Started Contributing
File Management File Tree, Editor API
Calendar Calendar API
Search Search Pipeline
Knowledge Graph User Guide Architecture
Theming Theming, Editor API
Study Tools Study Tools Hooks
Layout Workbench, Status Bar Hooks